Last year, the average American watched nearly 8 hours of TV per day. And as we have seen this year, more and more viewers are turning to streaming services to catch all the action from their favorite shows, thanks to Wi-Fi.

According to new data from comScore, there’s a rising number of people that choose to stream their favorite shows only over a Wi-Fi-enabled device, rather than watching them on cable. This year, nearly 5 million U.S. households chose to stream TV via a virtual multichannel video programming distributor or vMVPD.  These are streaming services that provide cable TV-like programming only over the internet like Sling TV, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue and Hulu Live. This is a 58% jump over last year.  

Not only do more and more people rely on vMVPDs, they’re also spending significantly more time streaming on these devices. In fact, households with an vMVPD spent nearly half their total streaming hours on the device.

In addition, findings from this data also suggest that the demographics of consumers that use vMVPDs are expanding beyond just younger consumers. “In April 2017, 29 percent of households using a pure-play vMVPD had a head of household under age 35. In just one year, that percentage dropped eight points to only 21 percent, indicating a higher number of older viewers are now using vMVPDs.”

As vMVPD adoption grows, the bandwidth required to stream shows on these platforms will as well. USA Today reported last December that streaming in 4K — an increasingly popular high-res viewing option — can consume as much as 25 MBPS. That amounts to over 3 gigabytes of data per half hour sitcom.

As we look to the future of how we watch our favorite shows, we can expect streaming to continue to play an ever-growing role. Having said that, it is crucial that additional spectrum resources are made available to support these activities, considering the vast majority of live streaming occurs over devices that are not connected to the internet via a wire, such as Wi-Fi enabled TVs, smartphones, etc.