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The vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – still watch television using traditional cable or satellite options, according to Nielsen. But the number of households that choose to opt out of cable or satellite TV is on the rise, from 2 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2013, Nielsen’s data show.

“This scares the bejesus out of the cable and satellite people,” said Jim Barry, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va. “I think it’s going to change the business model.”

A main driver behind the high cost of cable and satellite in recent years is the expensive license fees networks pay sports leagues to broadcast their games. The cost gets passed on to consumers to pay for the “bundles” of channels they get with their cable satellite subscriptions, whether they plan to watch sports or not.

or Internet-based TV to be a competitive option, it either needs to be cheaper than cable and satellite or it needs to provide the content that subscribers want in a better way.

For the companies still working on Web TV, it would mean charging less than traditional competitors for a service while paying more than traditional competitors to offer it.

for a Web TV offering to be truly Web TV, it would need to offer all the channels consumers want alongside the "over-the-top" video capabilities like Netflix and Hulu that they associate with Internet viewing.

Young adults more likely to have Zero TV

more than five million U.S. homes that, according to a recent Nielsen study, have “zero TV.” That’s up from just over 2 million in 2007.

In the face of customer losses, cable and satellite TV operators say they’re focusing on higher-value subscribers, willing to sacrifice bargain-hunting consumers who at satisfied with over-the-top video options like Netflix and free broadcast TV.

data clearly shows that cord-cutting is picking up the pace as the cost of cable and satellite TV service continues to climb skyward.

"This is not a Shazam-like feature. It happens before the ad is even broadcast,

ble to read the digital signals coming from the TV satellite feed (used for both satellite and cable TV), telling it when a TV spot from a specific brand has begun. It then triggers the launch of a mobile ad within three seconds of its detection of the TV spot.

On the other end, Xaxis targets users using data from TV audience measurement firm Kantar, which taps into about 1 million U.S. TV households. This could tell Xaxis, for example, which viewers index high for consuming television dramas or live vocal competitions. The campaigns are only designed to reach connected devices on a home Wi-Fi, rather than those who are on mobile devices, Finnegan says. "We want to reach people who are stationary and if they are on Wi-Fi we can assume they are hanging out at home," he notes.

To Intel, and to some analysts, the behavior by the existing distributors — in some cases giving financial incentives to friendly channel owners, in other cases including punitive measures in contracts — has an anticompetitive whiff. The antitrust division of the Justice Department is looking into the issue as part of a broad investigation into cable and satellite company practices,

As Nielsen has found for some time now, there is a negative correlation between streaming and TV viewing

the numbers don’t show that people watching the least TV are streaming far more.

According to the Nielsen report, women aged 50 and older watched the most TV again in Q3, at more than 205 hours per month.

networks for years have complained that total viewing of their shows isn't being captured by traditional ratings measurements. This is a move to correct that.

decision to expand beyond traditional TV ratings measurement came out of a meeting in New York on Tuesday of the What Nielsen Measures Committee, a group that has been meeting for nearly a year.

By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.

Still, you might say a revolution is brewing in the living room — and this one will be televised. It portends not only a change in the TV viewing experience but also poses a threat to cable and satellite TV distributors. Even network executives' notions about scheduling — how positioning a new show adjacent to a popular program in the evening lineup to drive ratings — look anachronistic at a time when Nielsen estimates that 47% of all American households have DVRs and can watch recorded shows whenever they choose, and 55% of broadband homes have at least one TV connected to the Internet, according to market researcher the Diffusion Group.

Concerns about how to reach this group known as the "never connecteds" and count their viewing in a show's ratings adds to a list of headaches that include slumping prime-time broadcast TV ratings and the flight of advertisers to cable.

these smart TVs may look dated compared with what Silicon Valley giant Intel has in store for later this year, not to mention whatever Apple Inc. is planning with its mysterious but hotly anticipated flat-screen TV.