Last month, Nielsen introduced The Media Distributor Gauge, a cross-platform view of total TV consumption aggregated by parent media company.
“The new insight removes the siloes of traditional television versus streaming, and puts all content distributors on a level playing field to allow for additional perspective of TV viewing today,” Nielsen says.
What does the May 2024 report look like?
FOX jumped from a 6.1% share of total television viewing in April to 6.4% in May, demonstrating the largest increase in share among reported national media companies this month. FOX’s growth was amplified by a nearly 5% monthly viewing increase from its affiliate FAST provider Tubi TV (which also accounted for a platform-best 1.8% of total TV usage), and a 1.6% monthly increase from FOX News Channel, Nielsen reports.
Disney retained the largest share of TV viewing among all distributors with 11.4% this month.
Across the other 13 media companies ranked in The Media Distributor Gauge, a 1.3% monthly bump in viewing to The Roku Channel led the FAST provider to a platform-best 1.5% share of TV and a step up to 10th overall—the only company to climb in the rankings this month.
YouTube and NBCUniversal also each added 0.1 share point in May to account for 9.7% and 9.0% of total TV viewing, respectively.
As covered in the May 2024 report of The Gauge, time spent watching TV in May was down slightly compared with April, which led the majority of media companies to either remain flat from a share perspective (Paramount, Warner/Discovery, Netflix, Scripps, Weigel), or to give up 0.1 share point (Disney, Amazon, A&E, Hallmark, AMC).
Several updates to The Media Distributor Gauge have been implemented in this new May report, following the first-ever report for April. Some entities have been added and mapped to the appropriate distributor, specifically NBA-TV and Hogar de HGTV have been mapped to Warner/Discovery, and Twitch has been mapped to Amazon.
The addition of these entities to their respective distributors would not have changed the share or ranking of Warner/Discovery or Amazon in April, but did impact each distributor by an increase of 0.1 share point in May, Nielsen says.
The measurement interval for May 2024 was April 29-May 26.
