NEW YORK Every Tuesday, the Nielsen company publishes a popularity ranking of broadcast television programs that has served as the industry’s report card dating back to when most people had only three networks to choose from.

And every week, that list gets less and less meaningful.

With DVRs, video on demand, game consoles and streaming services, tablets and smartphones, the way people watch television is changing, and the industry is struggling to keep on top of it all. Even the idea of “watching television” is in flux. Are you “watching TV” when you stream an episode of “Downton Abbey” on a tablet?

Nielsen, which has long had a virtual monopoly on the audience statistics that drive a multibillion-dollar industry, last week took an important step toward accounting for some of the changes. Starting in September, Nielsen will begin measuring viewership through broadband devices such as game consoles for the first time. Right now, those numbers go uncounted.

“The ratings are a very one-dimensional look at what is happening,” said Alan Wurtzel, top research executive at NBC Universal, “and we now live in a very multi-dimensional world.”

Nielsen’s weekly rankings count people who watch a broadcast TV show live or on their DVRs that same day through midnight on the West Coast. To be sure, this is still how most people watch television. CBS didn’t need anything other than live numbers to know that its new reality show “The Job” was a flop – and canceled it a week ago after two episodes.

Through separate, less publicized rankings, Nielsen can also track how many people see a program on a time-shifted basis. One ranking, which measures live viewership plus those who watch on DVR or video on demand within three days of the original airing, is what the industry uses to set advertising rates. Other rankings measure those who watch within a week, or even within a month.

Those numbers can present a much different picture of a program’s popularity.

During the last week of January, for example, ABC’s “Modern Family” ranked No. 12 for the week with 10.8 million viewers if you count just the people who watched on Jan. 23. But within seven days, 15.9 million people had seen the episode, enough to make it the third most popular show of the week behind two “American Idol” episodes. Fox’s “The Following” finished a modest 15th place initially, but its audience jumped by 45 percent over the next week, enough to lift the show to fourth place.

In a world where people demand information faster and faster, television executives are no different. They want ratings now. The problem is, all of the changes in content consumption demand patience. Nielsen’s report on how many people watch a show within seven days isn’t released until three weeks after a show first airs – a glacial pace.

Nielsen says it regularly discusses how it releases ratings with all of its clients, and there’s been no consensus on change. Most people watch their favorite shows as quickly as they can, said Pat McDonough, Nielsen senior vice president of insights and analysis.

Each week the average American spends 32 hours and 15 minutes watching live television, according to a Nielsen study issued last month. More than 12 hours is spent either watching time-shifted TV or DVDs, playing on game consoles, surfing the Internet or watching video on computer or mobile devices, the study states.

“The one thing most people don’t think about is a lot of the additional viewing is rolling out slowly over time and right now, live plus same-day viewing is the best way to measure,” she said. “It may not be that way five years from now.”

Networks dispute the notion that things are changing slowly, although they are happy that Nielsen will soon be able to estimate how much television is being watched on broadband. There’s a limit to the information, though: Nielsen can’t yet tell specifically which programs people are watching this way.

Later this year, Nielsen hopes to roll out a pilot program to identify what people are watching on iPads. It’s unclear when this technology will be available for other tablet brands or for smartphones.