Streaming beats cable for the first time to claim largest share of TV viewing to date

[Shawn Knight]

What just happened? Streaming claimed the largest share of TV viewing in July for the first time ever. Streaming viewership has beat broadcast viewing in the past, but this marks the first time streaming has also trumped cable according to new data from Nielsen's monthly analysis of television delivery platforms.

Streaming represented 34.8 percent of total television consumption last month, narrowly edging out cable's 34.4 percent share. Broadcast viewing accounted for 21.6 percent of the pie.

Streaming usage grew 3.2 percent from June and a whopping 22.6 percent year over year. Cable usage dropped two percent from June and 8.9 percent on a year-over-year basis, while broadcast volume dipped 3.7 percent compared to the previous month and 9.8 percent versus July 2021. Despite the shift in viewership shares, total TV usage was virtually identical compared to the previous month and the same period a year earlier.

Nielsen data reveals that audiences watched an average of 190.9 billion minutes of streaming content per week in July. Excluding a single week in December 2021, the weeks of July 2022 represent the highest-volume streaming weeks Nielsen has ever recorded.

Streaming giants including Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video and YouTube all reached new heights in July.

Netflix viewers watched nearly 18 billion minutes of Stranger Things last month, and The Umbrella Academy and Virgin River combined for nearly 11 billion additional viewing minutes. On the film side, The Sea Beast and The Gray Man added over five billion minutes to Netflix's total.

Hulu saw a boost from the new season of Only Murders in the Building and the debut of The Bear. The new series The Terminal List and new episodes of The Boys combined for over eight billion viewing minutes on Amazon's streaming service.

A slowdown of new content on traditional television as well as a dip in sports programming also aided streaming. With professional and college football seasons just around the corner, however, streaming's position at the top of the hill could be short lived.

Image credit: Amateur Hub

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https://www.techspot.com/news/95672-streaming-beats-cable-first-time-claim-largest-share.html

 

[terzaerian]

Cable dethroned at the exact moment that streaming has become more unwieldy than cable as short-sighted rightshoarders balkanize the landscape.

 

[dirtyferret]

Just like cable dethroned broadcast networks 20 years ago. The king is dead,... long live the king...

 

[hahahanoobs]

When streaming gets big enough, more ads will come.
Bet.

 

[Lionvibez]

Not surprised I cut the cord like 5 years ago.

 

[rmcrys]

When streaming gets big enough, more ads will come.
Bet.

Streaming had an excellent price because it had to acquire market share quickly; now that it has acquired, the pieces are already increasing.

In a couple of years cable will be a minor-league and you'll have streaming at:
1) $15 - $20 base price WITH ads all the time
2) over $20 without them
3) extra paid content like paid channels on cable (like Amazon Video)

People will always have free alternatives....

 

[p51d007]

If it wasn't for the "old" channels, I wouldn't watch the garbage on TV these days.
Woke this and that, opinion shows staged as "news", FAKE so called reality shows.
I watch the "classic" channels like MeTv, Antenna TV, Grit, INSP, Cozi.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Streaming had an excellent price because it had to acquire market share quickly; now that it has acquired, the pieces are already increasing.

In a couple of years cable will be a minor-league and you'll have streaming at:
1) $15 - $20 base price WITH ads all the time
2) over $20 without them
3) extra paid content like paid channels on cable (like Amazon Video)

People will always have free alternatives....

I'm betting on #2 and possibly #3 having ads too. Ads make more than the product. Too much profit to ignore forever.

I'm a little worried looking forward.

 

[wiyosaya]

I think the streaming services are in for a rude awakening.

Speaking for myself (although I am sure there are many others like me), I've maintained that all of them do not understand that streamers like myself dropped cable/satellite services because they did not offer true value and were just too expensive to maintain subscriptions to those services especially for people like me and my wife who only watched maybe 5-channels regularly out of the 100s of channels available.

We were subscribing to Hulu and Prime, but dropped them for similar reasons. Prime offers free shipping, but we will order enough to get free shipping when we order from Amazon anyway, and often, I'll order stuff elsewhere just to not have to put up with Amazon crap.

In the meantime, for services that do not release their material on disk, we plan on subscribing for a month, then dropping the service.

And, yeah, my wife and I both agree that there is enough quality content on Netflix for us to maintain an active subscription to them, but find that no other streaming service offers enough quality content for us to maintain an active subscription.

IMO, the moral of the story is that streaming services think that everyone who subscribes does so to keep up with the fad. For my wife and I, nothing could be further from the truth. I will not subscribe just for the sake of subscribing - especially if there is not enough content in which we have interest.

We also have an antenna and there is plenty of stuff OTA that keeps our interest.