“Bridgerton” Season Three, Part Two (Photo by Liam Daniel/Netflix © 2024)

Erik Gruenwedel

July 23, 2024

Netflix may be a streaming video behemoth, but when factoring in legacy television, the streamer doesn’t make the podium when it comes to entertainment market share. Still, the SVOD pioneer is making a run for the top.

As covered in Nielsen’s report of The Gauge, 40.3% of time spent watching TV in June was attributable to streaming. Streamers like Netflix and YouTube saw the most benefit from a big streaming month. Time spent watching YouTube on television was up 4.2% in June to push the Google-owned social media video platform to nearly 10% of total household TV usage — the second largest share of TV among media distributors.

 Nielsen tabulated its data from May 27 through June 30.

While eight of the 14 companies ranked by Nielsen saw usage increases in June, affiliate streaming platforms helped rebalance the viewing share for multi-platform distributors across the board.

With 10.8% of June’s TV viewing time, Disney maintained the top spot among media distributors, driven by a 15% increase in Disney+ usage. Tubi, which notched 2% of TV in June and a 15% bump in usage, climbed the ranks among its fellow Fox affiliates and was the company’s second best performer behind Fox News Channel, helping Fox jump to 6.6% of TV (+0.2%).

NBCUniversal retained its podium spot as the third ranking media distributor in June with 8.5% of TV market share, despite a loss of half a share point. The Olympics will put the spotlight on NBCU throughout July and August as their coverage of the biennial event has historically drawn large audiences to all of its platforms, according to Nielsen.

The lack of sports and drama content on broadcast networks was, however, beneficial to cable entrants A&E, AMC and Hallmark whose affiliates helped fill the gaps by riding increases in viewing across feature film and drama genres.

A&E Network’s 1.4% share of TV was up 11.1%; Hallmark’s 1.2% share of TV was up 6.1%, and AMC Networks’ 1.1% share of TV finished up 7%. The measurement interval for June 2024 was May 27 through June 30.

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