For the fourth consecutive month, Suits has dominated the streaming landscape, according to Nielsen’s latest TV report, The Gauge.
Last week, the company reported that the legal drama has racked up more than 45 billion minutes viewed since arriving on Netflix in June. Although viewership has been slowly and steadily declining since September, Suits it was still the most streamed title in October. In second place was Grey’s Anatomy, which also had an unexplained resurgence in September and October.
Most notably, The Fall of the House of Usher managed to become the fourth most streamed title in October, despite debuting 12 days into the month.
Streaming usage remained stable across all platforms compared to last month, accounting for just over 36% of TV usage in October, Nielsen reports. Streaming was driven by Netflix, which had eight of the top 10 titles.
Still, Netflix slightly decreased its global share of TV usage, reaching 5.6% in the month. The other two top 10 titles, Blue It is Elementaryit belonged to Disney+, which represented a 1.9% share of TV usage.
Thanks to Thursday Night FootballPrime Video managed to maintain its 3.6% share of TV usage, a personal record achieved in September.
Although streaming remained uniform, the general public spent more time watching TV in October. Overall TV usage increased 2% from September, Nielsen reported. This was primarily due to growth in broadcast viewership, which grew to 24.6% of total TV usage – marking its third consecutive month of growth. This is the broadcast’s highest attendance since January.
It’s common for broadcast TV to see seasonal increases, but this one is particularly noteworthy because it happened despite a severe lack of new scripted content due to writer and actor strikes. Instead, the broadcast genre grew 9.4%, largely due to sports programming. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the broadcast sports genre saw a massive 360% increase in viewership in September.
In October, the increase was just 15%. But sports still accounted for 30% of all free-to-air TV viewing.
Although the broadcast is doing well on a monthly basis, the genre is still down 5.6% in terms of viewership year over year.
Cable TV viewership also increased slightly in October, benefiting mainly from sports and news. However, cable still had the lowest share of TV usage to date, at just 29.5%.
See more in the graph below:
