Turns out live sports still reliably brings viewers to linear TV and streaming alike.
In January, TV viewership was up 5% compared to December, according to new data from Nielsen, driven largely by live sports on broadcast and cable leading up to the Super Bowl. Streaming viewership made up 42.6% of TV viewership in January, with Netflix and The Roku Channel hitting new viewership highs.
Overall, last month’s streaming viewership was 3% higher compared to December 2024, and was 21% higher than a year ago, Nielsen found. (The company’s reporting period ran from Dec. 30 to Jan. 26.)
Netflix and The Roku Channel in particular increased their pieces of the viewership pie to 8.6% and 2.1%, respectively, according to Nielsen.
Keep score: Football played a big part in bringing eyeballs to both streaming and linear, according to Nielsen. Prime Video’s stream of of a Jan. 11 NFL wild-card playoff game contributed to that day being the second-highest streaming day in history with more than 47 billion streaming minutes. (The day with the highest streaming viewership ever was on Christmas Day 2024, when Netflix streamed two NFL games; that day saw 51.2 billion minutes streamed, according to Nielsen.)
On cable, ESPN’s coverage of the College Football Playoffs helped create a 42% month over month lift in cable sports viewing, while the NFL’s AFC Championship game on CBS saw the month’s largest audience overall at 57.4 million viewers.
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W̶o̶r̶k̶ Stream like a dog: It’s not just football that grew streaming viewership last month. Netflix’s Squid Game, which released its latest season near the end of December, was January’s most-streamed title, which generated a cool 9 billion views over the course of the month. The second most-streamed title was the kids’ show Bluey, available on Disney+, which brought in 4.7 billion viewing minutes in January. With Bluey’s support, Disney’s streaming services (which combines Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ streaming viewership) notched 4.7% of TV share.
“January also highlighted how consumers’ viewing habits have evolved to become more flexible when seeking out preferred content across various distribution platforms,” the report read.
And the award goes to: While sports were big on linear TV, other annual programming dominated non-sports broadcast telecasts in January, including ABC’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and the Golden Globe Awards on CBS, which brought in 17.9 million and 9.7 million viewers, respectively.
Traditional television viewership got bumps from drama series and news, too, which saw viewership in January grow 15% and 18%, respectively. The post-AFC Championship premiere of the CBS drama Watson was the second most-viewed non-sports broadcast telecast last month, bringing in 10.8 million viewers. On the news side, Fox’s coverage of the US presidential inauguration attracted major viewership, and overall, cable saw a 26% increase in news viewing.
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