NBCUniversal Moves Up to #1 TV Distributor for August

One last medal for NBCUniversal’s Olympic coverage.

According to Nielsen, the Paris games were the primary driver of NBCU’s jump from third to first place among TV distributors in August. The company accounted for 13.4% of all TV usage in the United States during the August measurement period (July 29 through August 25), a 3.9 point (41 percent) improvement from the period July 29 through August 25. Media distributor rankings for July.

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Viewership across NBCU properties is up significantly from July, with broadcast network NBC up 62%, USA Network up 47%, and Peacock (also a record) highest usage rate of all time) was up 39%. The Democratic National Convention, which took place from August 19-22, also saw MSNBC’s viewership increase by 43% compared to July.

NBCUniversal’s 13.4% of all TV usage in August is the highest share ever on Nielsen’s Media Distributor Measure, which includes publicly available data going back to November 2023. Since April.

YouTube, which led the July distributor rankings, fell to second place in U.S. television usage at 10.6 percent. That was an improvement from July (10.4 percent), but not enough to counter big gains by NBCU. Disney came in third at 9.5 percent, with Netflix (7.9 percent) and Paramount (7.1 percent) rounding out the top five.

The Roku Channel (1.7% of all TV usage) also improved month over month (from 1.6% in July), while most of the other big players fell back slightly. As of the four months of publicly available data, the top 14 distributors accounted for nearly three-quarters of all TV usage in the U.S. The August rankings are below.

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