NEW YORK—The growing importance of FAST Channels in TV viewing can be seen in new data from Nielsen’s The Media Distributor Gauge, a cross-platform view of total TV consumption aggregated by parent media company, that showed Fox jumped from a 6.1% share of total television viewing in April to 6.4% in May.
In the May 2024 report of The Media Distributor Gauge showed that Fox’s growth was amplified by a nearly 5% monthly viewing increase from its affiliate FAST provider Tubi TV (which also accounted for a platform-best 1.8% of total TV usage), and a 1.6% monthly increase from Fox News Channel.
Disney retained the largest share of TV viewing among all distributors with 11.4% this month followed by YouTube at 9.7% and NBCUniversal at 9.0%.
Across the other 13 media companies ranked in The Media Distributor Gauge, a 1.3% monthly bump in viewing to The Roku Channel led the FAST provider to a platform-best 1.5% share of TV and a step up to 10th overall—the only company to climb in the rankings this month. YouTube and NBCUniversal also each added 0.1 share point in May to account for 9.7% and 9.0% of total TV viewing, respectively.
As covered in the May 2024 report of The Gauge, time spent watching TV in May was down slightly compared with April, which led the majority of media companies to either remain flat from a share perspective (Paramount, Warner/Discovery, Netflix, Scripps, Weigel), or to give up 0.1 share point (Disney, Amazon, A&E, Hallmark, AMC).
Nielsen also noted that it had made several updates to The Media Distributor Gauge in May. Some entities have been added and mapped to the appropriate distributor, specifically NBA-TV and Hogar de HGTV have been mapped to Warner/Discovery, and Twitch has been mapped to Amazon. The addition of these entities to their respective distributors would not have changed the share or ranking of Warner/Discovery or Amazon in April, but did impact each distributor by an increase of 0.1 share point in May, Nielsen said.
The measurement interval for May 2024 was 04/29/24 through 05/26/24.
