The presidential election and the conclusion of the World Series helped drive overall TV use to a nine-month high in November. But despite those big events on linear TV platforms, both cable and broadcast outlets lost some share of viewing in Nielsen‘s monthly platform rankings.
The ratings service’s Gauge snapshot for November also shows streaming hitting another all-time high in share of TV usage — the fourth such milestone in the past seven months — for the November period, which ran from Oct. 28-Nov. 24 and therefore doesn’t include Thanksgiving, one of the biggest broadcast viewing days of the year.
TV viewing as a whole rose by about 5 percent compared to October, driven by events across all platforms. Streaming services accounted for 41.6 percent of TV use for the month, up from 40.5 percent, with programming like Netflix’s Jake Paul-Mike Tyson boxing match and The Lincoln Lawyer, the most streamed show of the month with 3.9 billion minutes of viewing.
Three individual streaming services — YouTube (10.8 percent of all TV use), Prime Video (3.7 percent) and the Roku Channel (1.9 percent) — hit their highest marks to date in the Gauge.
With election night on Nov. 5, cable news unsurprisingly had a strong showing in the week of Nov. 4-10 with 48 billion minutes of viewing across all news channels (vs. 36 billion the week before). Viewing tailed off after the election, however, and cable news only improved by 1 percent month to month. Cable as a whole had 25 percent of viewing for the month, down from 26.3 percent in October.
Broadcast networks had 23.7 percent of TV use, with election coverage, the final three games of the World Series and NFL and college football games driving much of that. Though viewing time grew slightly month to month, broadcast outlets lost a small amount of viewing share (vs. 24 percent in October) as the growth wasn’t as much as that of streaming.
Nielsen’s Gauge rankings for November are below.
