• by Wayne Friedman , November 4, 2020

This year's Presidential election TV coverage was down 20% in average viewers compared to the 2016 Presidential election coverage, to 56.9 million, according to Nielsen.

Nielsen says 21 networks aired election results over a three-hour period -- from approximately 8:00 p.m. ET to 11:00 p.m. ET.

In 2016, 13 TV networks aired Presidential election coverage, amounting to 71.4 million viewers.

Nielsen says out-of-home (OOH) viewing as well as connected TV (CTV) viewing are included in this year's totals -- adding that CTV viewing amounted to as much as 11%.

This year's networks included ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Telemundo, Univision, Estrella, NBCLX, PBS, BET, BET HER, CNBC, CNN, CNN en Espanol, Fox Business Network, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, Newsmax, Newsy, Vice and WGN America.

Top individual TV networks were: Fox News Channel with 13.6 million; CNN with 9.1 million; MSNBC, 7.3 million; ABC, 6.1 million; NBC, 5.6 million; CBS, 4.3 million; and Fox, 3.4 million.

This year, viewers age 55 years and up totaled 27.8 million, while viewers 35-54 came in at 17.5 million and viewers 18-34 totaled 7.7 million.