The annual NCAA college men’s basketball tournament, colloquially known as “March Madness,” helped drive viewers to traditional television platforms, according to the latest Nielsen “The Gauge” report released on Tuesday.
Cable television benefitted the most from the basketball tournament, with its share of TV rising to 24 percent during the March coverage period, compared to 23.2 percent in February. NCAA March Madness tournament events are split across the channels of TNT Sports on cable — TNT, TBS and Tru TV — and on CBS, which is carried on most traditional pay TV platforms. Broadcast TV’s share of audience was 20.5 percent, down from 21.2 percent, but still going strong, assisted by March Madness games on CBS and the annual Oscars telecast on ABC.
In addition to March Madness games on TNT Sports, cable benefitted from higher interest in geopolitical events covered by news channels, with Fox News leading the pack, according to Nielsen. Coverage of President Donald Trump’s address to Congress — which took the place of an annual State of the Union address — attracted 11 million viewers to the network and more than 36.6 million viewers across all broadcast and cable networks, Nielsen said.
CBS wasn’t just a destination for the other half of March Madness games: Its action-drama TV series “Tracker” held five spots in the top 10 TV broadcasts during March, Nielsen said. Each episode averaged over 10 million viewers.
Taken together, traditional linear TV platforms accounted for 44.5 percent of all time spent with TV during the March coverage period, compared to streaming’s 43.8 percent share, the Nielsen report found. In February, traditional TV platforms held a 44.4 percent share, while streaming had 43.5 percent — so the figures barely changed, but still weighed in slight favor of traditional linear TV.
On the streaming side, Nielsen has adjusted the way it evaluates different platforms: As it did with Disney services in January, the company is now evaluating Warner Bros Discovery’s (WBD) Max and Discovery Plus as a single unit — called “Warner Bros Discovery streaming” — and has done the same with Paramount’s Pluto TV and Paramount Plus, grouping them as “Paramount streaming.”
The intent behind the new streaming platform groups is to evaluate the services based on the company that drives them, rather than on an individual basis, where some platforms may historically rank lower than others. Nielsen also produces a monthly report called the “Media Distributor Gauge” that takes a look at how companies are competing against each other based on their collective distribution platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming.
YouTube continued to be the top streaming platform in March, accounting for 12 percent of all time spent with TV, up from 11.6 percent in February. Netflix remained the second most-popular streaming service with 7.9 percent of time spent with TV, falling from 8.2 percent last month. Disney’s streaming services — Hulu, Disney Plus and ESPN Plus — ranked third with an even 5 percent of time spent with TV, while Prime Video came in fourth at 3.5 percent.
The new groupings of Paramount’s and Warner Bros Discovery’s streaming services brought each to 2.3 percent and 1.5 percent respectively. In February, Paramount Plus and Pluto TV had a collective 2.3 percent share, according to an evaluation of the report by The Desk, so little changed on a month-over basis. WBD-owned Max had a 1.2 percent share of time spent with TV in February, while Discovery Plus was not ranked.
