Nielsen Gauge Shows Usage Gains For Streaming, Broadcast

Looking at the longer seven-month view of “The Gauge” -- the relatively new Nielsen metric touting overall total TV viewing usage -- streaming platforms recorded a rise in share, and broadcast TV did too. Each gained by two percentage points.

In The Gauge’s latest November reading, streaming now has a 28% share (up from 26% in May), with broadcast at 27% (up by 25% in May).

Nielsen credits the increase in sports viewing for broadcast as a recent reason for the gain, as well as a rise in feature films on network television.

For streaming, it says Disney+ was higher as a result of more kids viewers and the release of movies "Shang-Chi" and "Jungle Cruise" in November.

Where did those four percentage points in total gains come from? Cable, in particular. While it still has a leading 37% share in total TV usage among persons 2+, cable TV is down from 39% in May.

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The “other” category -- which contains un-measured video game usage, streaming through cable set-top boxes and DVD playback -- was also dinged, coming in at 7% in November, down from 9% seven months ago.

Looking specifically at those high-profile individual premium streaming platforms, there is a slight change for two of the major ad-free subscription streamers -- Netflix and Disney. Both added one percentage point over the seven-month period. Netflix is now at a 7% share, with Disney+ at 2%.

Others in the streaming category remain at the same level: YouTube, 6%, Hulu, 3%, and Amazon Prime Video, 2%.

In the “other streaming” category, which includes other high-bandwidth video streaming on TV that is not broken out individually, that group had a 9% share, the same as it was in May 2021.

1 comment about "Nielsen Gauge Shows Usage Gains For Streaming, Broadcast".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, December 17, 2021 at 9:33 a.m.

    Wayne, it's dangerous to draw conclusions from this data as Nielsen is presenting it---rounded off to the nearest whole percentage point. For example Disney+ "doubled" its share  from October to November, going from 1% to 2%, but this seemingly huge increase might have been nothing more than a change from 1.4% in October to1.5% in November which would be reported as 1% vs 2% in the Nielsen pie chart. Overall, streaming's share seems frozen at 28% since July in these reports.

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