Wealthy tourists, dedicated medical professionals and college basketball’s best players made for a healthy March among Warner Bros. Discovery’s TV platforms.
The company had the largest month-to-month gain in Nielsen’s TV distributor rankings for the month, capturing 6.7 percent of all TV use in the United States. That’s up from 6.1 percent in February and marks WBD’s largest share of TV usage in five months.
HBO’s The White Lotus, which had a record-setting season in the ratings and ranked among the five most streamed shows of March, played a sizable role in boosting Warner Bros. Discovery’s viewing share. So did coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on TNT, TBS and TruTV and The Pitt on Max; the latter accounted for 2.3 billion minutes of viewing time in March.
YouTube led all distributors with 12 percent of TV use for the March period (which ran from Feb. 24-March 30). Disney finished second at 10.5 percent — and had the month’s biggest linear broadcast with the Oscars — and Paramount moved up to third with 8.5 percent, thanks partly to its portion of March Madness coverage on CBS and strong showings from its dramas Tracker (10.7 million viewers in March) and Matlock (9.2 million).
NBCUniversal (8 percent of TV viewing) and Netflix (7.9 percent) completed the top five. Fox, which hit a high in February thanks to the Super Bowl, declined from 8.3 percent to 7 percent, in line with its usual performance outside the NFL season.
The Media Distributor Gauge numbers for March are below.