TV podcast consumption: A new audience study

Media intelligence company Samba TV has released Podcasts On The Big Screen, a measurement study of podcast consumption via televisions. The research is powered by Samba TV’s proprietary chip technology which is embedded in a global footprint of about 46 million TVs, 28 million of which are located in the U.S. The company deploys its cookieless “Identity Graph” to identifyTV viewers across their phones, tablets, and computers.

This identifying power was deployed to measure the extent to which podcasts are played on TV sets.
The headline answer is 13%, in Q1 2026 — the percentage of American households that consume podcasts on TV. That measure applies to what Samba TV identifies as Netflix Households. There are between 75 million and 77 million Netflix Households in the U.S., according to Statista.

There’s another definition also — the meaning of “watched.” In this study, it means watching a podcast on Netflix for at least one minute. Rather a low bar, one might think, but nonetheless telling of listeners’ understanding of the availability of podcasts on Netflix, and the initiative to listen that way.