Streaming continued to chip away at broadcast and cable television’s share of time spent with TV in July, with the sector accounting for nearly 50 percent of all viewership that month, according to the latest “The Gauge” report from Nielsen.
With YouTube factored in, streaming accounted for 47.3 percent of all time spent with TV during the measurement period, with YouTube commanding nearly 14 percent of that share. Broadcast and cable TV accounted for a collective 40.6 percent share of time spent with TV, Nielsen reported.
YouTube excluded, streaming’s share of TV time was 33.9 percent, according to a calculation of data by The Desk, with Netflix being the most-comparable streaming video platform to a traditional TV network or channel on account of its curation and content licensing agreements. YouTube does not produce its own TV shows or movies, and it typically doesn’t license content, either.
For quite some time, Nielsen’s monthly snapshot of time spent with TV has put YouTube at the top, rolling it into the streaming category, without providing much detail about what people are actually watching through the app. By comparison, Nielsen offers more information about what people are — or aren’t — watching on other platforms and traditional TV networks during a measurement period.
Netflix saw a 5 percent increase during the July measurement period based on the latest season of “Squid Game,” which had 5.4 billion viewing minutes, helping the platform achieve a 5 percent uptick in monthly viewing. The streaming platform ended July with 8.8 percent share of time spent with TV, Nielsen said.
Peacock also saw sustained interest, owed largely to its distribution of “Love Island USA,” which helped it capture nearly 2 percent of all time spent with TV. Peacock also offers simulcasts of sports programming from NBC and Comcast’s cable networks.
On the broadcast and cable side, things remained light for July amid a lack of premium sports events and original shows leading into fall. News remained a bright spot for traditional networks, with “ABC World News Tonight” placing among nearly all the top 20 TV broadcasts during the measurement period, Nielsen said. Cable news and sports experienced sequential viewership declines in July, though ESPN saw a bump from the MLB Home Run Derby, which accounted for 5.3 million viewers.
Unlike streaming, Nielsen doesn’t provide a public breakdown of how each broadcast and cable network performs. Some of that data is available to Nielsen clients in privately-distributed reports that are similar to The Gauge, and most broadcasters and cable networks have internal data teams that evaluate Nielsen’s Gauge reports against provided and proprietary ratings data they collect on their own.
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