Disney firmly held onto its number-one spot in the second edition of Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge report that was released yesterday.

The media conglom’s combined platforms and channels cornered 11.4% of all US TV usage for the month of May, a result that was more or less flat compared to April (11.5%). YouTube (9.7%) and NBCUniversal (9%) finished in second and third place respectively, also without much month-to-month change in share. 

Disney’s performance was buoyed by a variety of content successes, ranging from live sports on ESPN, to co-viewing stalwart Bluey (which racked up more than 1.1 billion minutes of watch time on Disney+ for the first week of May alone).

Paramount (8.8%), WBD (8.1%) and Netflix (7.6%) finished just off the podium, all seeing no major gains or losses. But the one company that did buck the flat trend in May was FOX, which increased its share from 6.1% to 6.4%. Nielsen attributes much of this growth to the rising popularity of FAST platform Tubi—its May viewing numbers were up by 5% over April, but a whopping 43% compared to May 2023.

The Media Distributor Gauge measures cross-platform TV viewing on a monthly basis and  aggregates the data by parent company rather than by platform, which is how it’s presented in another monthly report called The Gauge. Nielsen says this approach helps to “[remove] the silos of traditional television versus streaming.” 

Image courtesy of Erik Mclean/Unsplash