The Television Critics Association's latest press tour in Pasadena, California included a long talk with an NBCUniversal executive about the changing nature of online video streaming. According to a Variety report, the executive unveiled a boatload of data that it sourced from a media tracking firm, much of which estimated how many people were watching the most popular series on platforms like Netflix and Amazon Video.

Alan Wurtzel, NBCU's president of research and media development, attributed its ratings estimates (the likes of which Netflix has never announced) to Symphony Advanced Media, whose free "Media Insiders" app tracked the viewing habits of "about 15,000" participating users between September and December 2015. The app does so, according to Symphony, by turning your smartphone into an unabashed tracking beacon—meaning that it turns your microphone on, keeps tabs on your location via GPS, and studies your browsing, app, SMS, and phone call history—in exchange for paid rewards.

In NBCU's case, the most interesting data was anything that tracked what programming viewers watched. The tracking app's combination of microphone and app surveillance allowed Symphony to hear when certain shows were broadcast around the house using platforms other than a standard TV signal, such as a smart TV, tablet, or game console—which presumably gathers more data than a standard Nielsen tracking box. Both Symphony and Nielsen base their national-viewing estimates on smaller sample sizes.

Symphony estimates that during this fall season, Jessica Jones topped Netflix's ratings with an average of 4.8 million viewers (ages 18-49) per episode in its first 35 days on the platform, followed by Master of None at 3.9 million and Narcos at 3.2 million. (Amazon's top series, The Man In The High Castle, scored 2.1 million viewers per episode, Symphony estimates.) Variety reported that Wurtzel followed these numbers with the phrase "Netflix reality check" before telling the TCA crowd, "The notion that [Netflix series] are replacing broadcast TV may not be quite accurate."

For comparison's sake, Nielsen's most recent TV viewership numbers from last week gave The Big Bang Theory the top spot at 1.9 rating, meaning over 8 million viewers, ages 18-49. (Updated to correct numerical error.)

The report ended with an intriguing list of bullet points, including Symphony's guess that time-shifted TV watching has grown from 19 percent of all viewing to a whopping 49 percent. NBCU also claimed that viewers who catch a show well past its air date tend to be younger and richer: in the "live plus three days" window, the median age and income is 52 and $74,000, which jumps to 43 and $91,000 "towards the end" of a 35-day watching window.