Streaming took another significant YoY leap in monthly U.S. TV viewership share in December 2024, with almost every major SVOD and FAST experiencing big individual usage upticks, while cable lost significant ground since the same time in 2023.
That’s the upshot from comparing Nielsen’s December 2024 “Gauge” tracker, released Tuesday, to the 2023 iteration. According to the measurement company, streaming services last month increased their aggregate share of total overall U.S. TV consumption to 43.3%, up from 35.9% a year prior. Over the same 12-month span, cable saw its TV time share decrease from 28.2% in December 2023 to just 23.8% last month.
Broadcasters, meanwhile, saw their share decrease more modestly, from 23.5% of December TV viewing to 22.4%.
Among the big streaming winners, YouTube saw its viewership share rise from 8.5% to 11.1% YoY, while Netflix was up to from 7.7% to 8.5%. Netflix’s December share benefited from two Christmas Day NFL games, but also strong consumption of holiday action thriller Carry-On and the release of season two of popular series Squid Game.
The only major U.S. subscription video-on-demand platform to experience a YoY TV usage share decline was Hulu, which shrank by a tenth of a point in share. Notably, the platform is now fully embedded in the bowels of the Disney+ app and Nielsen said due to that availability some Hulu app usage in December might inadvertently be credited to Disney+.
Among FAST services, The Roku Channel continued to build on a lead that it narrowly captured in November, when it surpassed Fox’s Tubi by a tenth of a percentage point. Roku now leads all free ad-supported streamers in for the latest monthly share of TV viewing, according to Nielsen, controlling 2% of U.S. viewership in December vs. 1.7% for Tubi.
Returning to the broader discussion of delivery platforms, the dwindling usage of U.S. cable platforms, of course, has not escaped the awareness of their operators, with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery each recently making moves to separate their linear media networks from streaming and studios, including Comcast's official spin out cable networks into a standalone publicly traded entity. As the Nielsen graphic below reveals, it’s notable that cable largely maintained its share of monthly TV time through the first half of 2024, before starting a trend of decline in the middle of last year.
