CBS Claims Lead In Total Broadcast Minutes Viewed Season-To-Date, With 166.7 Billion
- by Wayne Friedman , November 10, 2021
Through seven weeks of the new TV season, CBS says it leads all major broadcast networks in terms of total minutes viewed for persons ages 2+ -- with 166.7 billion minutes -- when looking at all programming "across all dayparts," including entertainment, news and sports content.
Viewing data, which comes from Nielsen's total day metric, is tallied from September 20 to November 7, for all programs -- including viewing beyond seven days from its live airing.
CBS says NBC is next at 130.8 billion minutes, with Fox at 108.6 billion and ABC at 98.5 billion.
The announcement follows Nielsen’s effort, starting in April, to measure streaming usage among four major services -- Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video -- for viewing activity per program.
Nielsen offers regular top-10 lists of persons ages 2+ for original, acquired and movie programming in terms of million/billion minutes viewed each week. Data comes from its national TV panel.
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Looking at specific daypart/program content, CBS says it leads in prime time with 59 billion minutes viewed for its entertainment programming since the start of the season. This is 10 billion more than its nearest competitor -- NBC’s prime-time entertainment programming.
By comparison, other programming, “NFL on CBS” -- all its NFL game content -- totaled 45 billion minutes. CBS says this is up 2% from a year ago. NBC's “Sunday Night Football” leads CBS in viewed minutes for NFL content.
Another 26 billion minutes has been viewed for CBS News programming.
The CBS network’s new drama series "NCIS: Hawai’i" has had 3.5 billion minutes viewed so far this season. Another new show, "FBI: International," came in at 3.1 billion minutes. Viewing of all three "FBI" franchise shows totaled 10 billion minutes.
In the most recent reading for the week of October 11, Netflix's "Squid Games" led all streaming TV series with 2.25 billion minutes.
Unlike traditional TV networks, Netflix -- as well as many other streamers -- typically releases all current-season episodes of a series at the same time.
All those minutes don't equal more viewers! They could have fewer viewers who happen to watch TV more often.
Very true Debbie.
So I guess that is why CBS and Wayne clearly refer to it as "minutes" and not viewers.
Looking at the data (and assuming it is correct), with a US population of 332m that equates to 502 minutes per person over the seven reported weeks. Put another way that is around 72 minutes a week. So if (say) only half the population watched any CBS across those 49 days then the active CBS viewers would average 144 minutes a week, and so on and so on.