TV Sets Disappearing From American Homes

After years of insisting it wasn’t so, the TV Industrial Complex now admits that it’s contracting: The number of people paying for TV has been declining for several years.

But, reports Recode that’s not the only part of the TV world that’s shrinking: Actual TV sets are disappearing from homes, too.

After years of steady increases, the number of TVs in homes shrank to an average of 2.3 in 2015, down from an average of 2.6 televisions per household in 2009, according to the latest available data from the Energy Information Administration.

The best-case scenario for that, put forward by the people who sell TV programming for a living, is that Americans are watching TV on devices that aren’t TVs, like laptops, tablets and phones. The flip side of that argument: You can do lots of other things on those devices, which creates even more competition for TV viewing time.