Business
Google’s YouTube TV Overtake Cable TV Viewership
The number of subscribers to Google’s YouTube TV has increased dramatically in recent years, and a new report suggests that this trend could continue until the service becomes the most popular pay TV subscription in the United States.
In recent years, streaming services have prompted numerous analysts to forecast a significant transformation in television consumption, posing an existential peril to the established dominance of broadcast and cable channels among the American populace.
A recent report by Nielsen detailed the exponential growth of the streaming industry’s market share.
According to Nielsen’s monthly The Gauge report, YouTube TV occupied 9.7 percent of the total television viewing in March 2024, reflecting a 0.4% growth compared to the previous month.
Since The Gauge began reporting in 2021, no streaming platform has surpassed this record-breaking figure.
The widely used video-viewing platform has maintained the highest market share among streaming services for the past thirteen months, with Netflix (8.1 percent) and Hulu (3 percent) following suit. The emergence of YouTube TV as a viable substitute for conventional cable may have contributed to this transition to some extent.
Streamers accounted for 38.5% of all television viewing in March, compared to 22.5% for broadcast and 28.3% for cable. While streaming viewership decreased by 1 percent from February to March, cable’s viewing share increased by 0.7 percentage points.
This is partially attributable to the simultaneous men’s and women’s NCAA basketball championships and the March Madness fervor; the women’s tournament final game attracted the most viewers to any college basketball game in history.
Views of the president’s State of the Union address increased significantly on cable and broadcast.
Broadcast remains firmly established in television consumption, whereas the influence of streaming appears to expand annually. Thus, cable appears to be the most negatively affected by this shifting television landscape.
Google is diligently developing YouTube TV, a TV-streaming division of YouTube. In the past year, the technology behemoth has introduced numerous new features; it is now implementing Multiview on mobile devices.
Although Multiview has been available on smart TVs for some time, a company representative today affirmed that the feature would soon be available on iOS and iPad devices. This is the appearance on iOS.
The employee verified in the same Reddit thread that Multiview will be available for Android “within the next few months.”
Significantly, the functionality is limited to a specific selection of sports channels; nevertheless, extensions will probably be forthcoming to accommodate a broader spectrum of channels.
