Although the Super Bowl and the
Winter Olympics drove some key spikes in TV viewing in February — for both streaming and linear TV — all key categories in Nielsen’s monthly “Gauge” took a hit.
Cable TV
viewing share was at 35.4% (down from 35.6% in January) in total day usage.
Streaming also dipped slightly — to 28.7% (from January 28.9%), while broadcast landed at 26% (down from
26.4%).
The second week of February posted a 38.9% share for sports programming for all of broadcast TV.
Only Nielsen’s “Other” category — which includes
unmeasured video-on-demand, streaming through cable set-top-box, video games and other TV device playback — showed a strong uptick.That category rose almost one full percentage point to 1o.0% (from
9.1%).
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Nielsen says consumers here spent more time with video gaming — especially during the Presidents’ Day holiday period. This was driven by some new video-game releases
including “Elden Ring,” “Horizon Forbidden West,” and “Destiny 2.”
Individual streamers were mostly unchanged.
Netflix, the streaming viewing leader, slipped to a
6.4% share (from a 6.6), followed by YouTube at 5.7% and Hulu with 3.0%. Both remained at the same levels as in January.
Two other major players dropped one-tenth of a percentage point
each: Amazon Prime Video, 2.3% (from 2.4%); and Disney+, 1.7% (from 1.8%).
The Gauge data comes from two separately weighted panels: Streaming data coming from a subset of
streaming meter-enabled TV homes in Nielsen’s National TV panel and for linear TV data — broadcast and cable — coming from Nielsen’s national TV panel.
The
data comes from a combination of live program-plus seven days of time-shifted viewing (L7) for much of the month, and live program-plus-three days of time-shifted viewing (L3) for the most recent
week.
