• by Wayne Friedman , December 15, 2022

With the NFL football season in full swing and fresh original streaming content continuing to grow, total day TV usage of persons two years and older for November climbed to the second-highest viewing month this year --- up nearly 8% versus October, according to Nielsen's The Gauge measure.

Nielsen says that over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday period, there were over 100 billion minutes of TV viewing per day -- including Thanksgiving Day, when audiences viewed nearly 106 billion minutes.

The best viewing day of the year so far was January 16, when it had three NFL wild-card games that brought in over 107 billion minutes.

January has been the best viewing month so far this year.

In November, streaming platforms witnessed their largest monthly increase ever -- up 10.2% in usage, giving streaming an industry-leading 38.2% share. Streaming is up 41.2% for the month versus November 2021.

Netflix, HBO Max, and YouTube all reported double digit percentage viewing increases versus October -- up 13.1%, 12.2% and 11.8%, respectively.

In terms of overall share of the market for November YouTube (including YouTube TV) now has a 8.8% share followed by Netflix at 7.6% and Hulu (including Hulu Live) at 3.9%. Amazon Prime Video is at 2.6%; Disney+, 2.0%; HBO Max 1.2%; and Pluto TV, 0.9%

Broadcast usage rose 6.7% from October due to NFL programming, World Cup coverage, and four World Series games.

Overall, the category witnessed a surge in sports viewing -- up 10.2% to reach an overall percentage of 32%, the largest share of broadcast viewing.

Broadcast news -- by way of midterm election coverage -- grew 14.6% compared with October. But broadcast prime-time drama declined by over 12%.

Overall broadcast share dipped 0.3 percentage points to 25.7%, as well as being down 1.6 points from the same month a year ago.

The cable TV category tacked on the smallest hike of any category -- 4.2%, now landing at 31.8%, which is down 1.1 percentage points.

Cable lost the most versus a year ago -- 5.1 share points (down 9.3% from 36.9% share).

Cable TV news is the category's strongest genre -- up 1.4% in volume to 18.9%. The second-strongest category for cable is feature films --which gained 32.7% to get to an 18.7% share.