Key Points
- Fall sports including NFL, MLB and NBA helped CBS and Fox streaming apps grow TV time share in Nielsen’s October report.
- Paramount and Fox saw strong sequential gains, with Fox Sports 1 up 285 percent and CBS stations up 13 percent.
- Disney climbed one spot as ESPN and ABC rose 9 percent on “Monday Night Football” and NBA viewership.
- Read more coverage of Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge on The Desk
The prominence of fall sports — especially premium events from the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) — helped broadcast network-owned streaming apps grow their share of television time during Nielsen’s October measurement period, the analytics firm reported on Monday.
Football games aired on CBS and Fox stations, and the start of the highly-contested World Series game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, gave both networks an edge over Netflix in October, with both ascending toward the top of Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge chart.
No one could topple YouTube and the Walt Disney Company, which have remained the top two media distributors for several consecutive monthly reports. But Fox and Paramount’s ascension in the chart proves that the strategy employed by both companies — deliver premium events over their premium streaming services — are working, and helps explain why non-network streamers like Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video have pursued their own sports rights so aggressively over the past few years.
That strategy has certainly paid off for Paramount and Fox, whose streaming apps and stations saw sequential increases when compared to September:
- Paramount Plus Essentials / with Showtime: +8.3 percent
- CBS stations and affiliates: +13 percent
- Fox Sports 1: +285 percent
- Fox stations and affiliates: +12 percent
The NFL and MLB helped boost CBS and Fox across the board, while Fox also enjoyed sequential viewership increases thanks to college football. CBS benefitted from its news magazine program “60 Minutes” and scripted dramas like “Tracker” and “Matlock,” Nielsen said.
Disney’s networks and streaming services grew viewers by 7 percent and climbed one spot in the distributor ranking, Nielsen said. Strong viewership to ESPN and ABC affiliates, likely spurred by “Monday Night Football” and the start of NBA games, drove a 9 percent bump in viewership to Disney’s linear networks, while streaming services contributed to another 7 percent increase, Nielsen said.
Among smaller players, Hallmark benefitted from the start of its holiday programming a bit early, with movies driving an uptick in viewership during the measurement month, Nielsen said. Hallmark posted the largest overall lead in watch time, with a 0.1 percentage gain to end the month with a flat 1 percent of TV time.
