The holiday season brought big gifts to several streaming platforms, with YouTube, Netflix and Prime Video all hitting or tying their best mark ever in Nielsen‘s monthly snapshot of TV use.
The ratings service’s December Gauge rankings — which, due to a quirk of how Nielsen collects its data, also includes the last week of November — show streaming services commanding an all-time high of 43.3 percent of all TV viewing in the United States. That’s within a few percentage points of the combined 46.2 percent for broadcast (22.4 percent) and cable (23.8 percent) for the month.
YouTube, as usual, was the top individual streaming service with 11.1 percent of TV use, up from 10.8 percent in the November rankings and its best showing to date. Netflix — which had two heavily watched NFL games on Christmas — matched its all-time high of 8.5 percent (set in July 2023), and Prime Video had 4 percent thanks to its weekly NFL games a big holiday movie in Red One and the first few episodes of its high-profile competition show Beast Games.
Broadcast networks had the four biggest individual telecasts of the December period with Thanksgiving NFL games on CBS, Fox and NBC and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, also on NBC. But with a lot of regular programming going on hiatus for the holidays, viewing of dramas fell by 18 percent month to month. On cable, news viewing slumped by 27 percent following the presidential election.
Nielsen’s Gauge for December covers Nov. 25-Dec. 29, due to the company collecting data for “broadcast weeks” of Monday to Sunday. Dec. 1 was the last day of the week that began Nov. 25, so it’s included in the December rankings. Platform and individual streaming service rankings are below.
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