Netflix reached another milestone that will worry traditional cable companies even further. According to a study by Leichtman Research Group, Inc., more people in the US report subscribing to Netflix than having a DVR in their households. Netflix narrowly eclipses the service offered by most cable providers, with 54 percent of US adults reporting they have Netflix in their households compared to the 53 percent of US adults that have DVR. This is the first time this shift has happened—Leichtman notes that back in 2011, 44 percent of US adults had a DVR while just 28 percent had Netflix.

"On-Demand and time shifting TV services like DVR, VOD, and Netflix have permanently changed the way that people can watch TV," writes Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at Leichtman, in the report. "Today, over 50 percent of households have a DVR and, for the first time in the 15 years of this study, over half of households have Netflix. Yet traditional TV viewing still exists. For example, 46 percentof adults agree that they often flip through channels to see what's on TV."

The percentage of US adults that watch some form of subscription video on-demand service (SVOD) is even greater. Leichtman estimates that 64 percent of US adults subscribe to either Netflix, Amazon Prime, and/or Hulu, with 51 percent of them streaming at least monthly. The study estimates that 23 percent of US adults stream Netflix daily, which is up dramatically from 6 percent back in 2011.

The Netflix takeover of American households is likely aided by the change in the number of TVs that adults have. Recently released data from the US Energy Information Agency's (EIA) Residential Energy Consumption Survey shows that slightly more Americans are living with fewer TVs in their households, with about 2.6 percent of households having no TV at all. That's up from about 1.3 percent, and that number has held nearly steady since 1997. The EIA notes "younger households tend to have a lower concentration of televisions per person and a higher concentration of portable devices such as laptops and smartphones," but it would not say the shift was directly caused by this preference toward mobile devices in younger households.

You don't need a TV to watch Netflix at all. While you can stream Netflix to a television using set-top boxes or devices like Google's Chromecast, the service was originally meant for PCs (mostly laptops or convertibles), tablets and, smartphones. Live TV watching is still dominated by TVs and the cable companies that provide the content, but we could see a similar shift in the coming years as the competition to provide the best live TV streaming service continues to heat up.