Disney kept a lock on the top spot as the media company responsible for the biggest share of TV viewing in May.
That’s according to Nielsen‘s second Media Distributor Gauge, which looks at how TV use stacks up by company. Disney’s 11.4 percent of all TV use in May includes viewing on ABC, ESPN, FX, Hulu, Disney+ and the other cable and streaming properties under the Mouse umbrella. Disney’s share of TV use is consistent with its April figure of 11.5 percent — which was part of the first publicly released distributor rankings — and with the six months of data Nielsen had compiled before going public with the numbers.
A host of live sports telecasts, including the NBA playoffs, on ESPN and a number of season finales on ABC helped keep Disney on top of the list for the month.
YouTube remained in second place for May with 9.7 percent of TV use, also in line with its April showing of 9.6 percent. NBCUniversal (9 percent), Paramount (8.8 percent) and Warner Bros. Discovery (8.1 percent completed the top five, with Netflix (7.6 percent) not far behind. As noted in Nielsen’s other Gauge rankings for May, YouTube and Netflix are the largest individual streaming platforms by a wide margin.
The 14 distributors in May’s rankings are the same as those who made the list in April, and there was little or no change in share for 13 of them. The exception is Fox, which added 0.3 points to its share to climb to 6.4 percent of TV usage. The increase was driven by a 5 percent spike in viewing on Fox’s FAST service Tubi (which on its own had 1.8 percent of TV use for the month) and an uptick in Fox News viewing. Another FAST platform, the Roku Channel, edged up to 1.5 percent of use, tying Weigel Broadcasting (which distributes retro channel MeTV).
The 14 companies who hit Nielsen’s threshold of 1 percent of all TV use made up about three quarters (72.7 percent) of TV use for the month. The media distributor rankings for May are below.
