Disney Leads TV Viewing In April; ‘Fallout’ Boosts Amazon Streaming Share With Record Viewership, Nielsen Says

Katie Campione
·2 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

April was a pretty steady month for TV viewership — and Disney was leading the charge.

Along with its monthly The Gauge report, Nielsen debuted a Media Distribution report on Tuesday that assesses cross-platform TV consumption by media company. The Walt Disney Company took the top spot, accounting for 11.5% of total TV viewing. About 42% of that share was attributable to Disney+ and Hulu, Nielsen reported.

More from Deadline

YouTube came in second place with a 9.6% share of TV in April. It’s worth nothing that, naturally, all of YouTube’s viewing comes from streaming. The platform is consistently the highest ranked in terms of streaming share each month, and April was no different. It came in far above Netflix’s 7.6% share, which put that streamer in second place for streaming.

But, as Nielsen is pointing out with its latest report, streaming still doesn’t tell the entire story. Netflix came in sixth place when accounting for cross-platform viewing, beat out by NBCUniversal at 8.9%, Paramount at 8.8%, and Warner Bros. Discovery at 8.1%.

Even though Prime Video was in eighth place with a 3.2% share of TV viewing (also completely from streaming), it still managed to have a breakout month thanks to the release of Fallout, which was Amazon’s most successful program to date and topped all other streaming titles in the month of April.

The show helped boost the streamer to the largest increase among streaming services this month with a 12% monthly increase for 3.2% of TV.

However, streaming was down overall from March to April, accounting for 38.4% of television viewing, according to Nielsen. Even YouTube saw a 3% monthly decline.

Broadcast was also down by 3% in April. It accounted for a 22.2% share of TV viewing, and women’s sports were the highlight of this category. The top broadcast telecast in April by a wide margin was the NCAA women’s basketball championship with more than 17M viewers.

The drama genre accounted for 29% of broadcast viewing, driven by Tracker, NCIS and Young Sheldon on CBS, and Chicago Fire and Chicago Med on NBC.

As for cable, that was the only category to grow month-over-month. It was up to 29.1% of TV viewing, aided by a large increase in sports viewing from the NCAA basketball tournament coverage, NBA playoffs and the NFL draft.

See more below.

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.