Peacock had its best month yet in August, posting the highest share of U.S. TV usage in the streamer’s four-year history, thanks to the Summer Olympics.
With a broad menu of Olympics coverage, Peacock rose from 1.5 percent of TV usage in July to 2.1 percent for the August period (which runs from July 29 to August 25), according to Nielsen’s monthly Gauge report on TV viewing by platform. That’s an all-time high for the service, which averaged about 1.3 percent of all TV usage over the previous 12 months. The August figure includes all but three days of the Olympics and about 19 billion of Peacock’s 23.5 billion total minutes of viewing of the games.
The Olympics were also a big hit for NBC, which produced the 19 biggest broadcasts of the month on its broadcast networks, 17 of which averaged more than 10 million viewers. Broadcasters as a whole accounted for 22 percent of TV usage in August, up from 20.3 percent in July.
Overall TV usage increased 8 percent month over month, again fueled by 14 days of Olympic coverage. Streaming (41 percent of all usage) and cable (26.3 percent) both declined 0.4 points, and other TV usage, including gaming and physical media playback, fell to 10.7 percent from 11.6 percent in July.
YouTube continued to lead all individual streaming platforms and accounted for more than 10 percent of all TV viewership for the second straight month, closing out August at 10.6 percent (up from 10.4 percent in July). Disney+ (2.3 percent) also rose two-tenths of a point.
Below is Nielsen Gauge data for August 2024.