April was a pretty steady month for TV viewership – and Disney led the way.
Along with its monthly The Gauge report, Nielsen on Tuesday unveiled a Media Distribution report that assesses media companies’ cross-platform TV consumption. The Walt Disney Company took the top spot with a share of 11.5% of all television viewers. About 42% of that share came from Disney+ and Hulu, Nielsen reported.
YouTube took second place in April with a TV share of 9.6%. It’s no use that, of course, all YouTube views come from streaming. The platform consistently ranks highest in terms of streaming share each month, and April was no different. It was well above Netflix’s 7.6 percent share, putting that streamer in second place in streaming.
But as Nielsen points out in its latest report, streaming still doesn’t tell the whole story. In cross-platform viewing, Netflix ranked sixth, surpassed by NBCUniversal at 8.9%, Paramount at 8.8% and Warner Bros. Discovery at 8.1%.
Even though Prime Video was in eighth place with a TV share of 3.2% (also entirely from streaming), it still had a breakout month thanks to the release of Stand outAmazon’s most successful program to date, surpassing all other streaming titles in the month of April.
The show helped the streamer achieve the biggest gain among streaming services this month, with a monthly increase of 12% on 3.2% of TV viewing.
However, according to Nielsen, streaming was down overall from March to April, accounting for 38.4% of TV viewers. Even YouTube saw a 3% monthly decline.
Broadcasting also fell 3% in April. The TV share was 22.2%, with women’s sports being the highlight of this category. By far the most-watched program in April was the NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship, with more than 17 million viewers.
The drama genre accounted for 29% of shows broadcast, driven by Tracker, NCIS And Young Sheldon on CBS and Fire in Chicago And Chicago Med on NBC.
As for cable, this was the only category that grew month over month. It was up to 29.1% of television viewers, helped by a sharp increase in sports viewing through coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament, NBA playoffs and the NFL Draft.
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