Per Nielsen: Last News

CBS had a good premiere week.

Anna Marie de la Fuente In an exclusive interview with Variety, Ronald Day, Telemundo’s president of entertainment & content strategy, drilled down on what has made action-packed series “Lord of the Skies” (“El Señor de los cielos”), the company’s longest-running Super Series franchise and a bonafide hit. With Season 9 set to premiere Feb.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Traditionally a strong performer in the fall and holiday TV season, Food Network is sizzling this summer, too. From Memorial Day on May 27 through July 20, Food Network content has drawn more than 50.6 million total viewers across the linear TV channel, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streamers Max and Discovery+.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer TLC’s “Sister Wives” returned Sunday, drawing the show’s highest-rated season premiere in six years with the first episode of Season 11. Per Nielsen data, the reality show’s 11th season premiere averaged 2.2 million total viewers and a 1.42 rating among women ages 18-49, the advertiser-coveted demographic for the cable channel. That demo rating was the highest for a “Sister Wives” premiere in six years. Additionally, Episode 1 of Season 11 drew a 1.91 rating among women ages 25-54, another key market for the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TLC. According to TLC, on the “Sister Wives” Season 11 premiere night Sunday, “tweet volume saw triple digit growth compared to the previous premiere,” growing 192%). It was also the top primetime cable reality program on Facebook, No. 3 on Instagram and No. 4 on Twitter for social interactions.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer As a Sunday night series, the first episode of “House of the Dragon” was only available for streaming during the final three hours of Nielsen’s window for calculating its weekly SVOD ratings for Aug. 15-21. But in that brief period of time, the “Game of Thrones” prequel managed to be watched for 327 million minutes via HBO Max, according to the ratings currency company’s new rankings. “House of the Dragon” premiered Sunday, Aug. 21 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and was immediately available for streaming on HBO Max at that time. The Nielsen-provided figure here only counts streaming viewership, meaning anyone who watched “House of the Dragon” via HBO’s linear channel or any other platform is not included in the count.

Selome Hailu Viewership of “House of the Dragon” increased by 5% between Episodes 3 and 4, Variety has learned exclusively. Per Nielsen, linear viewing of the series remained mostly steady, with 2.536 million viewers across four cable airings for the week-ago episode compared to 2.474 million this Sunday. But with streaming on HBO Max and other HBO platforms included, Variety has confirmed overall U.S. viewership of the series is up 5% week over week. Titled “King of the Narrow Sea,” Episode 4 premiered on Sunday night as NBC was airing Week 1 of Sunday Night Football. The programs will air concurrently for the rest of Season 1’s run. Additionally, “House of the Dragon” slightly competes for linear viewership with a show on its own network: “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” returned to HBO on Sunday night after two weeks off the air, shifting the timing of Episode 4’s repeat airings to later timeslots.

Viewership of streaming programming surpassed that of cable TV for the first time in July, Nielsen reported.

The CW was only founded 16 years ago, and throughout that short life, it’s been known as both the youngest broadcaster and the broadcaster with the youngest audience. That’s why when Nexstar COO and president Tom Carter stated during a conference call Monday that the average viewer of the network, which is being acquired by the TV station group giant, is 58 years old, the internet had a hard time swallowing the stat.How is it possible that the average viewer of the home of YA-centric content like “Riverdale,” “All American,” “Walker” and “The Flash” is in their late 50s?But as Variety has independently confirmed with measurements from Nielsen, the Nexstar exec was correct: the median age for the CW’s primetime viewer throughout the 2021 calendar year was 57.4, according to Live + 7 Day data.

EXCLUSIVE: Eddie Murphy is set to star in Candy Cane Lane, a Reginald Hudlin-directed holiday comedy for Prime Video. Produced by Amazon Studios, Imagine Entertainment, and Eddie Murphy Productions, the comedy was acquired as a spec script written by Kelly Younger and inspired by Younger’s childhood holiday experiences. Production begins this winter in Los Angeles.

Selome Hailu “Stranger Things” Season 4 and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” are currently the leading titles on their respective streamers, and both debuted on May 27. With “Stranger Things” maintaining its status as one of Netflix’s most popular original properties, and “Obi-Wan Kenobi” marking the latest expansion of the “Star Wars” franchise, their premieres created what Nielsen called “the most anticipated weekend ever in streaming” — and Netflix came out on top.Netflix reported that Part 1 of the fourth season of “Stranger Things” had the company’s biggest premiere weekend ever for an English-language series, garnering 287 million hours viewed globally.

Abbott Elementary” on ABC in December, creator, executive producer and star Quinta Brunson has been credited with spearheading “the return” of the network comedy. She’s grateful for the love, but she isn’t so sure about that particular compliment.“Network, all this time, has still been putting big comedies on the air,” she says. “CBS especially was banging out shows with super high ratings, like ‘Young Sheldon.’ ‘The Big Bang Theory’ was on the air forever.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterNielsen’s media data arm Gracenote is launching new tools to measure the “bingeability” and streaming availability of TV shows to offer companies guidance in licensing and acquisition during the Peak TV era.Joining Gracenote’s Content Analytics data group, which features Inclusion Analytics and Audience Predict, the Distribution Dynamics and Program Availability Archive will “provide the content marketplace insights into characteristics of programming that drives consumption and historical availability enabling data-driven decision-making,” per Nielsen.The Distribution Dynamics offering will look at the following, in order to evaluate how specific streaming and broadcast series are consumed: Per Nielsen, “Leveraging this intelligence, streaming services and networks can optimize slate management through visibility into what content is better suited for viewer acquisition versus viewer retention, or what types of programming better resonate with certain audiences. Media companies and studios can solve content distribution challenges by understanding what programming to create or license to maximize viewership.

ABC and CBS kept their Sunday ratings momentum going, earning wins in the demo and audience, respectively.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals drew just over 100 million total viewers.Per Nielsen data, the game averaged 99.18 million viewers on NBC and an additional 1.03 million viewers on Telemundo. That means this year’s Super Bowl telecast was up 8% from 2021’s showdown between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs, which drew about 91.6 million.NBC’s multiplatform broadcast of the Rams defeating the Bengals in a tight cinch for the Vince Lombardi Trophy— 23 to 20 —rose above the 100 million linear viewer threshold and set a record for streaming.NBC not only ran the 2022 NFL championship game, but also all national ads, the halftime show featuring hip-hop and rap legends Dr.

Wednesday primetime was a pretty tame one, with NBC’s Chicago trio and ABC’s sitcom slate in reruns. Instead of the NBC series topping the nightly ratings as they tend to do, Wednesday belonged to CBS with its broadcast of Let’s Make a Deal.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla Series like “Reservation Dogs,” “Gossip Girl,” “Run the World,” “Bling Empire,” “Rutherford Falls,” “The Wonder Years” and “The Sex Lives of College Girls” helped make 2021 a good year for diverse, on-screen representation. Those shows helped break barriers for AAPI, BIPOC and Native American visibility on television, as well as LGBTQ+ inclusion.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla “NCIS: Hawai’i” and “FBI: International,” CBS’ hottest new freshman dramas have, been given full-season orders for the 2021-2022 broadcast season.“These two terrific new dramas are off to a tremendous start,” said Kelly Kahl, President, CBS Entertainment, in a statement announcing the renewals. “They have significantly strengthened and improved our lineup on their respective nights and are generating huge increases on our streaming platforms as well.

In a virtual presentation today during the Cannes Lions brand confab, Nielsen shed a bit more light on streaming from its growing body of research on the U.S. market.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla Despite competing for viewing time with CBS’s explosive Oprah interview featuring the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, TNT’s NBA All-Star Sunday held its own in ratings.Per Nielsen primetime numbers, the All-Star game during which Team LeBron dunked on Team Durant at the home of the Atlanta Hawks, was the most-viewed program among people ages 18-34 and brought in a larger audience for people under 45 (3.26 million viewers) than the aforementioned revelatory celebrity interview, which drew 3.01 million viewers in the category. Moreover, TNT was the most-viewed network in primetime on Sunday among people under 49 during the 7 to 11 p.m.

Patrick Hipes Executive Managing EditorThe return of Tyler Perry’s House of Payne along with the series premiere of Tyler Perry’s Assisted Living both debuted Wednesday to solid ratings on BET, airing in a four-episode, two-hour block that was simulcast on BET Her.House of Payne, which originally ran for 254 episodes on TBS from 2006-2012, returned with what Perry is calling its seventh season, growing in the ratings each quarter-hour. Per Nielsen’s data encompassing premieres and encores, the first episode drew a 0.48 rating in the adults 18-49 demographic and 922,000 total viewers on BET, with the second growing to a 0.59 rating and 1.09 million viewers.

Netflix controlling the flow of its viewership information, Nielsen is getting more into the streaming ratings game to give audiences new viewing numbers. This week, the data company revealed a top 10 list of SVOD streaming stats for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video for the week of Aug.