Sports Dominates Last Week’s Most-Watched Programs
Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for May 20-26, with insights from Inscape, the currency-grade smart TV ACR data provider and data technology division of Vizio. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).
Sports and related programming is usually a driving force for watch-time, but they were especially dominant on last week’s ranking, holding seven of the top ten chart positions and nine of the top 25. NBA playoff games continue to capture the highest viewership share, although with the tournament winding down that share fell week-over-week, from 5.04% to 2.43%.
Some more highlights around the most-watched programming on TV:
College baseball is winding up, with the NCAA Softball Tournament stealing third place (1.11% of minutes watched), while men’s college baseball took fourth (1.08%). MLB games, meanwhile, accounted for 0.81% of watch-time (No. 8).
PGA Tour Champions Golf, the branch dedicated to men over 50, swung into No. 22 with a 0.46% viewership share, while the flagship PGA Tour landed at No. 10 (0.74%).
Yellowstone, which hasn’t aired on live, linear TV since the end of March, rockets into the ranking at No. 14 thanks to rerun marathons on Paramount Network.
Additional week-over-week ranking newcomers include The Voice (No. 12), Chicago P.D., NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt and Wheel of Fortune.
ABC leads TV networks for viewership share — get the details on The Measure.
