US streaming takes its largest share yet in March
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Editor
| 22 April 2022
The monthly total TV and streaming snapshot from measurement firm Nielsen, The Gauge, showed that for March 2022, streaming captured its largest share of total television usage ever, making up nearly 30% of overall viewing time.
Nielsen Gauge March 22April2022
Total viewing dropped 4.2% compared with February and despite a 0.7% decrease in time spent streaming from February, viewing share across all streaming platforms was either flat or gained slightly in March. The ‘other’ streaming subset of the research, which includes any high-bandwidth video streaming on TV that is not individually broken out, increased its share by 0.3% as more streaming platforms continue to gain traction.

Looking at platforms, cable stood out as the only viewing category to see an increase in both share and volume, jumping 1.6 share points from last month. Cable news viewing was up 14% from February and accounted for 21% of the cable share, driven by continuing news coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Broadcast viewing was down 1.1 share points from February, impacted said Nielsen by a 53% decrease in sports viewing, as it was a challenge to replace the amount of viewership from the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl. Drama programming stood out as the genre of choice for many broadcast consumers in March, increasing viewership by 17% from February and accounting for a third of broadcast’s share.

While broadcast news consumption remained relatively flat at 14% of broadcast viewing, Nielsen found the volume of broadcast news programming dropped 6% versus the prior month.