College and NFL football propelled Disney to 11.9% of all U.S. TV viewing in January, according to Nielsen‘s latest Media Distributor Gauge report.
YouTube once again topped the list at 12.5%, according to the monthly snapshot of viewing by distributor. (See the full chart below.) Netflix ticked up 1% from December, despite having the month’s most-viewed program in Stranger Thingstaking the No. 3 spot at 8.8%.
The Playoff, which expanded last year to 12 teams from four, mostly airs on ABC and ESPN, with January’s championship game drawing an average audience of 30.1 million viewers. Sports overall propelled linear viewing to a 12-month high in January, with ESPN tune-in rocketing 82%, as Nielsen had previously reported. Along with the expanded field, this year’s CFP also featured a run to glory by Indiana, which has a broad and undernourished base of fans across the country.
Disney leaped 1.2 share points over its December level, the biggest monthly gain by a distributor since Nielsen began the company-oriented version of the Gauge in the spring of 2024.
Along with the surge at ESPN, Disney’s ABC affiliates drew 10% more viewing than in the prior month, powered by NFL games, broadcast dramas’ post-holiday return and events like New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and The Rose Bowl Parade.
The sobering news for any traditional exec perusing the latest Nielsen numbers is that while legacy networks had specific pieces of programming providing boosts at certain intervals, YouTube is a far steadier machine. It has remained in the 12% to 13% range for several months, setting the pace not due to one particular source of content but thanks to a collection of regularly viewed channels. The Google-owned video giant said last December that video podcasts racked up 700 million hours of viewing in 2025, up from 400 million in 2024. (Nielsen tracks viewing only via a TV set, not on mobile.)
NBCUniversal and Versant (tracked by Nielsen as a single entity despite Versant’s January spinoff from Comcast in light of their unified ad sales operations) added 5% in market share to reach 8.5%. Sports and Peacock’s new season of unscripted hit The Traitors were cited as key drivers. Affiliates of Spanish-language NBCU network Telemundo registered a 13% jump in viewership, due largely to sports reality hit Exatlon. The network contributed 0.7 share points to NBCU-Versant’s total.
Nielsen said the January measurement period spanned four weeks, December 29 through January 25.
Here is the full January chart:
