It’s a significant day in our little TV biz. Today for the first time TV viewing outside the home will be fully integrated into Nielsen’s national TV ratings.
This is a big deal for sports. Basically from the day I started at Fox the two things that were often talked about as potential game-changers for sports TV were legal gambling and out-of-home ratings. Now they’re both here.
Sports already dominates any ranking of TV’s most-watched shows. With the inclusion of out-of-home, how much more will sports control the high end of the TV marketplace?
How will news and business networks, already soaring during the pandemic, grow with OOH? What time periods will suddenly become more attractive for sports events? Which sports will benefit most? A lot of interesting questions will be answered this year.
We know from preliminary data that the OOH sports audience is younger, more female and more diverse than the in-home audience. Will that change how sports are valued? We’re already seeing huge impact to local MLB viewing among young people.
Credit is due to @Nielsen for seeing this through after years of development and very vigorous debate among their clients. Their job, and it’s a hard one, is to provide the most complete measurement possible and let the marketplace negotiate its value, and they’ve done it.
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From the day MLB returned through the end of NFL Week 4, total viewing of live sports is up +7% nationally.
While total sports viewing is up, nearly every major nationally televised property is down. MNF is still up +1%. Otherwise, declines range from -2% for FOX NFL to more than -50% for numerous properties.
Not included in the analysis is regular season MLB on regional sports networks, and in the context of nearly universal declines for national sports the +5% increase in RSN MLB viewership is even more impressive.
It’s somewhat interesting to me that on the Dem side the gap between Biden and Harris overnight ratings (8%) was quite a bit less than the gap between Trump and Pence ratings (34%).
The length of President Trump’s speech, the longest acceptance speech in history, did not appear to have any impact on viewership. Looking at overnight ratings by quarter hour, the ratings held basically steady throughout.
As we head into Super Bowl weekend, want to post a couple tweets on what I think is an ongoing correlation between increased news viewing and NFL ratings.
Start with total minutes of news viewing on national TV in recent years: