For the fourth straight month, Suits dominated the streaming landscape, according to Nielsen‘s latest state of TV report The Gauge.
Last week, the company reported that the legal drama racked up more than 45B minutes viewed since it landed on Netflix in June. While viewership has been declining slow and steady since September, Suits was still the most-streamed title in October. In second place was Grey’s Anatomy, which also had an unexplained resurgence in September and October.
Most notably, The Fall Of The House Of Usher managed to become the fourth most-streamed title in October, despite premiering 12 days into the month.
Streaming usage was stable across platforms compared to last month to make up just over 36% of TV usage for October, Nielsen reports. Streaming was buoyed by Netflix, which had eight of the top 10 titles.
Still, Netflix declined slightly in its overall share of TV usage, coming in at 5.6% for the month. The other two top 10 titles, Bluey and Elemental, belonged to Disney+, which comprised a 1.9% share of TV usage.
Thanks to Thursday Night Football, Prime Video was able to retain its 3.6% share of TV usage, which is a personal best that it reached in September.
While streaming stayed even, overall audiences spent more time watching TV in October. Overall TV usage was up 2% versus September, Nielsen reported. That was mostly due to growing broadcast viewership, which grew to comprise 24.6% of total TV usage — marking its third consecutive month of growth. This is broadcast’s largest share since January.
It is common for broadcast TV to see seasonal upticks, but this one is particularly noteworthy because it happened despite the severe lack of new scripted content due to the writers and actors strikes. Instead, the broadcast genre grew by 9.4% largely due to sports programming. This shouldn’t be a surprise, considering the broadcast sports genre saw a massive 360% viewership increase in September.
In October, the increase was only 15%. But, sports still made up 30% of all broadcast TV viewing.
While broadcast is faring well on a monthly basis, the genre is still down by 5.6% in terms of viewing year-over-year.
Cable viewership was also up just a tad in October, benefitting primarily from sports and news. However, cable still saw its smallest share of TV usage to date with only 29.5%.
See more in the graphic below:
