TV usage rose across the board in November, fueled by a host of big sports events, election coverage and the holiday movie season. Streaming continued its months-long streak of gaining its share of viewers’ time, while cable slipped to its lowest mark so far.
Nielsen’s Gauge report for the month shows TV use spiking 7.8 percent from October, with five days recording more than 100 billion minutes of viewing across all platforms. Thanksgiving, fueled by three highly rated NFL games and NBC’s annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast, was the biggest day of the month with 106 billion minutes of viewing.
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Streaming commanded 38.2 percent of TV use for the month, up from 37.3 percent in October. Time spent on streaming platforms rose by about 10 percent. Streaming has increased its share of viewing each month since March and has ranked ahead of cable and broadcast for the past five months.
Broadcast viewing increased by 6.7 percent month to month, owing largely to sports — including four World Series games and the start of the men’s World Cup — and news, including midterm election coverage. Together, those two types of programming made up nearly half (46.6 percent) of time spent watching network TV. Because the growth in viewing time lagged behind the overall increase, however, broadcast’s share of the TV pie was relatively flat at 25.7 percent, compared to 26 percent in October.
Cable shrank to 31.8 percent of all TV use in November, its third straight decline. The biggest growth area for cable was in feature films, in part because of the onslaught of holiday movies on channels like Hallmark and Lifetime. Films accounted for 18.7 percent of all time spent on cable for the month, just behind news (18.9 percent).
YouTube (8.8 percent of all TV use), Netflix (7.6 percent) and Hulu (3.9 percent) remained the top three individual streaming services. Nielsen says YouTube TV accounted for about 15 percent of overall YouTube use, while Hulu + Live made up 12 percent of Hulu’s total.
Nielsen’s Gauge rankings for November are below.
Platforms
Streaming*: 38.2 percent of TV use
Cable: 31.8 percent
Broadcast: 25.7 percent
Other: 4.3 percent
*Includes linear streaming on MVPD apps and VMVPDs such as Hulu + Live and YouTube TV. Broadcast and cable content viewed through linear streaming apps also credit their respective categories.
Streaming Services
YouTube (including YouTube TV): 8.8 percent
Netflix: 7.6 percent
Hulu (including Hulu + Live): 3.9 percent
Prime Video: 2.6 percent
Disney+: 2 percent
HBO Max: 1.2 percent
Pluto TV: 0.9 percent
All others: 11.3 percent
