According to the latest Nielsen report, cable TV saw a boost in March thanks to the March Madness tournament.
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Things continue to shift in the TV landscape, and, as it almost always is, it was thanks to sports. This time around it was the March Madness tournament that helped lift cable TV from 23.2% last month to 24% this month. Broadcast TV, however, was down from 21.2% to 20.5%.
YouTube continues its climb. In January, it was 10.8%, in February, it hit 11.6%, and in March, it took in 12% of all TV viewing. The number doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Meanwhile, Netflix, the king of the paid subscription services, dipped from 8.6% in January to 8.2% in February. It continued that trend in March with 7.9%, an even more surprising number when considering Adolescence‘s success.
Disney numbers now contain all of Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN which makes it more difficult to measure growth for the moment, but it had a strong month and grew from 4.8% to 5%.
Overall, all of streaming grew from 43.5% to 43.8%, topping its start of the year numbers.
Nielsen – The Gauge – March 2025
Max is no longer being broken out on its own and is now lumped in with Discovery Plus under the Warner Bros. Discovery banner. Seeing as Max was at 1.2% in February, and the new number is 1.5%, we’re going to say that things did not improve.
And, at long last, Nielsen has put Paramount Plus and Pluto together. The numbers last month, respectively, were 1.3% and 1%, so the 2.3% shown this month shows no growth. Peacock fell from 1.5% to 1.4%.
In the realm of FAST (Free Ad-Supported Television), Tubi dipped from 2% to 1.9%, while the Roku Channel grew from 2.1% to 2.2%.
Analysts are predicting we’re going to see a lot of shakeup with the current economic headwinds that are beginning to appear. Netflix is considered somewhat safe at this juncture, but all of the other pay services are pretty large question marks. If we were to take a gamble, we suspect we’ll see YouTube, Tubi, and Roku Channel enjoying some significant growth in the coming months.
IMAGE SOURCE: Shutterstock – Streaming – Poxima Studio
