• by Wayne Friedman , Yesterday

YouTube maintained its strong leading position for viewing in May against legacy TV-network companies -- inching up one-tenth of a percentage point from April to a 12.5% share, according to Nielsen's reading of aggregate platform viewing for each major media distributor.

In second place, Walt Disney continues to lead all legacy TV-network based companies with a 10.7% share of all TV-streaming viewing -- the same result as in April.

NBCUniversal had a 8.0% share, followed by Paramount Global with 7.9%, Netflix at 7.5% and Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Inc. each with 7.0%.

There was little change for the top five companies, although WBD and Fox made noticeable gains -- up 0.3 and 0.2 percentage points, respectively.

WBD's gains came from NBA playoffs -- specifically, eight New York Knicks games carried on TNT that pulled in seven billion viewing minutes.

Fox -- which posted strong Nascar race action with Fox Sports 1 -- also had a growing 2.2% share for Tubi, its FAST (free, ad-supported/streaming TV) channel.

Disney also continued to have the best results among any legacy TV-media company when it came to its growing streaming business -- reflected in share as a percentage of its overall TV viewing business -- at 46.7%, according to Guggenheim Securities analysis of Nielsen data.

Fox was next with 31.4%, followed by Paramount Global at 27.8%, Warner Bros. Discovery with 21.4% and NBCUniversal at 17.5%.

Disney also had the lowest exposure in terms of linear TV viewing as a percentage of all its TV viewing -- at 53.3% -- followed by Fox with 68.6%; Paramount, 72.2%; WBD, 78.6%; and NBCU at 82.5%.

Farther down tue list, Amazon and The Roku Channel each grew one-tenth of a percentage point to a 3.6% and 2.5% share, respectively.