NBCUniversal Vaults to No. 1 Among TV Distributors for August

Chalk up one last medal for NBCUniversal‘s Olympics coverage.

The Paris Games were the primary driver of NBCU jumping from third to first place among TV distributors in August, according to Nielsen. The company accounted for 13.4 percent of all TV usage in the United States for the August measurement period (which ran from July 29 to Aug. 25), a 3.9-point (41 percent) improvement from July’s media distributor rankings.

Viewing across NBCU properties grew substantially compared to July, with the NBC broadcast network rising by 62 percent, USA Network by 47 percent and Peacock (which also set an all-time usage high) by 39 percent. The Aug. 19-22 Democratic National Convention also helped push MSNBC’s viewership up by 43 percent compared to July.

The 13.4 percent of all TV use for NBCUniversal in August is the highest share to date in Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge, which has data dating back to November 2023 and has been public since April.

YouTube, which led the July distributor rankings, slipped down to second with 10.6 percent of U.S. television use — an improvement on July’s number (10.4 percent) but not enough to hold off the huge gains for NBCU. Disney finished third with 9.5 percent; Netflix (7.9 percent) and Paramount (7.1 percent) complete the top five.

The Roku Channel (1.7 percent of all TV use) also improved month-to-month (from 1.6 percent in July), while most of the other big players declined some. As has been the case for all four months of publicly available data, the top 14 distributors accounted for about three-fourths of all TV use in the U.S. The August rankings are below.