People are more likely to watch television for the second month in a row. Nielsen reports that the time spent watching television increased by 2.2% in October, compared to the previous month.
The primary uptick in viewership came from broadcast, which managed about 26% of overall viewing for the month — a 10% increase from September’s 24.2%. That’s its its largest share since February 2022.
Last month’s broadcast usage was about 25%, an increase of 19% over September. However, dramas stole the spotlight with nearly 27% of overall broadcast viewing — a significant 42% jump from last month.
As expected, streaming still dominated monthly viewing with 37.3% of the overall number, which is slightly higher than last month’s 36.9%. Streaming viewership has increased year-over-year for all services.
YouTube’s September streaming record was broken with 8.5% viewing. Netflix had 7.2%. Both Hulu and YouTube benefited from the surge in broadcast viewing in October by way of their linear streaming components, which made up 12.3% and 14.6% of each services’ share, respectively.
Cable viewing fell from 33.8% down to 32.9%. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering cable’s share has dropped every month since March. Cable viewing declined 8.6% over the past year.
Cable news viewing increased by 3.3% in October. It had the highest share of all cable channels. Cable sports saw the highest increase in viewing (+25%) compared to last month and represented 9.6% of cable’s share.