In recent weeks in the United States, streamers, television channels, and advertisers have been suffering from an ailment that Peter Steinberg at Variety has dubbed Gauge Rage. At the heart of this issue is the Nielsen Gauge, a monthly overview of consumption on connected TV screens, broken down between streaming, broadcast (traditional TV), and cable (pay channels). Here is what the latest Gauge published by Nielsen looked like:

As can be seen, streaming commands the lion’s share with 47% of consumption on connected TV screens in the US, compared to 21.5% for broadcast and 21.2% for cable.

This free metric has often been used by streamers to argue either for their dominance (“YouTube, the leading streaming service in the US!”) or for their relative smallness (“We, Netflix, represent only 8.8% of screen time; that’s less than 10%, it’s low. And even if you add HBO Max, we’ll still be behind YouTube, so let us acquire Warner Bros!” The same argument was used by Paramount). In short, this indicator has gained significant importance within the American ecosystem, to the point of becoming a key reference, bolstered by Nielsen’s reputation as the definitive institute for TV audience measurement.

So what is the problem? Where does this Gauge Rage, currently shaking the American audiovisual sector, come from?