The audience for streaming services surpassed the total audience for pay channels on US televisions for the first time.
According to a survey by the Nielsen Institute, streaming consumption represented 34.8% of total audiovisual content in July, while pay TV and open TV respectively with 34.4% and 21.6 %.
Comparisons made by Nielsen only include programming watched on televisions and Smart TVs. It does not take into account streaming on mobile devices (such as mobiles and tablets) or on the web. If you counted these numbers, the difference would be much, much greater.
The July performance wasn’t the first where streaming had more audiences than open TV. But, until then, the platforms had never beaten pay TV in the United States.
Netflix was the service with the highest share of overall views, with a record 8.0%. Part of this success was the nearly 18 billion minutes of viewing of the fourth season of “Stranger Things”, added to the 11 billion minutes accumulated by the series “Virgin River” and “The Umbrella Academy”. Among the films, the most viewed were “The Beast of the Sea” and “The Hidden Agent”, with over 5 billion minutes watched. Nielsen is based on measuring minutes, not hours predicted.
The second most successful platform was YouTube with 7.3% of the entire audience, more than double that of third-place Hulu with 3.6%. The good positioning of Hulu was, in part, due to the successes of the second season of “Only Murders in the Building” and the premiere of “The Bear”, which together had more than 3 billion minutes watched. Prime Video got 3% of views, followed by 1.8% by Disney + and 1% by HBO Max. Other streaming services added another 10.2% of all views.
The numbers reinforce Netflix’s audience retention power, as well as show that Disney + subscriber numbers are not reflected in the consumption of its content. It makes sense, since it is one of the platforms with the least original attractions.
Overall, streaming consumption in July increased 3.2% from the previous month and gained 1.1 share points. Streaming time in July averaged nearly 191 billion minutes per week, and each of the five weekly measurements taken in July now represents five of the six highest-scoring streaming weeks ever recorded.
The viewing of pay TV, in turn, fell by 2% in July and participation points, compared to June, also fell by 0.7. This fall is constant. Year after year, pay-TV consumption fell by 8.9% and by 3.3 share points. Sports viewing saw the largest decline, down 15.4% from June and 34% from a year ago when the Tokyo Olympics began. This coincides with the advancement of streaming with respect to sports broadcasting rights.
Meanwhile, free-to-air TV viewing fell 3.7% in July, compared to June, and represented a loss of 0.8 share points. But it’s worth remembering that American open TV usually stops producing new content at this time of year, resuming it at the start of the fall season, which begins in September.
Source: Terra
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
