Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 2023: Birds Of A Feather Stream Together – Peacock Float
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Thanksgiving TV viewership gave media corporations lots to be glad about this 12 months.
A spread of events over the vacation broke rankings records.
NBC drew an all-time record 28.5 million viewers this 12 months during its broadcast of the 97th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, up 6% from last 12 months, Variety reported Friday.
The feat is impressive as swaths of consumers opt to chop the cord and move away from linear TV. Despite the trend, greater than two-thirds of the parade audience, about 22.3 million viewers, tuned in via traditional TV, in line with Variety.
Football was one other rankings monster over the vacation.
CBS’ Thanksgiving broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys’ win over the Washington Commanders was essentially the most watched program on any network since Super Bowl LVII earlier this 12 months, the network said in a Friday post on X, formerly Twitter. The sport captured 41.8 million viewers based on Nielson data, peaking at nearly 44.3 million viewers. The published’s viewership rose a whopping 31% from last 12 months’s CBS Thanksgiving game, but got here in about 500,000 viewers lower than last 12 months’s Cowboys-Giants matchup within the comparable timeslot.
While CBS didn’t release rankings numbers for Paramount+, the network said it notched its most-streamed NFL regular season game ever on the streaming platform.
Fox’s Packers-Lions matchup grabbed 33.7 million viewers per Nielson, essentially the most watched Thanksgiving Day game ever for the 12:30 p.m. ET timeslot and up 6% from the comparable game last 12 months, the network said Tuesday. Fox, unlike its competitors, doesn’t have a dedicated streaming platform for its major programming.
NBC Sports said on Friday that its broadcast of the San Francisco 49ers’ victory over the Seattle Seahawks was the second-most watched Thanksgiving primetime game ever, behind 2015’s Thanksgiving Bears-Packers matchup. The published averaged 26.9Â million viewers across the network’s platforms based on fast national Nielson data.
The sport was also NBC Sports’ most-streamed primetime NFL Thanksgiving game ever, with viewership led by its platform Peacock, NBC Sports said Friday.
As a complete, average viewership across all three games was 34.1 million, the very best for Thanksgiving Day on record, the NFL said Tuesday.
Amazon also joined in on the fun this 12 months. The corporate paid a reported $100 million to broadcast the Latest York Jets and Miami Dolphins matchup the day after Thanksgiving, in hopes that the Black Friday NFL game would grow to be a practice on Amazon’s Prime Video platform. The hefty price tag adds to the $1 billion per 12 months Amazon already pays to broadcast NFL’s Thursday Night Football. The e-commerce giant also attempted to make use of the NFL broadcast to drive product sales on the busiest shopping day of the 12 months. Rankings numbers for the Friday game haven’t yet been released.
“It might make sense that it is not going to do in addition to the Thursday games since it’s a special platform on a special day,” said sports media consultant and former Fox Sports executive Patrick Crakes. “That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have loads of value.”
As for that whopping $100 million price tag paid to broadcast the Friday game, don’t expect Amazon to make up that cash in any straightforward way. The investment serves as a marketing tool to grow value elsewhere, whether it’s Prime subscribers or retail sales, Crakes said.
More broadly, the Thanksgiving broadcasts were successful for the promoting market, in line with Kevin Krim, the CEO of knowledge analytics firm EDO Inc.
“The rankings were quite good from Nielson and the ad performance was quite strong,” Krim said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“Consumers responded very aggressively” to big discount messages, Krim said.
Traditional TV’s Thanksgiving rankings success comes at a critical time, because the industry tries to survive and adapt while consumers cut the cord. Viewership also indicated that linear TV doesn’t must suffer for streaming to capture strong rankings, and vice versa.
“Everybody knows where to seek out the NFL,” said Crakes. “It shows that the facility of traditional TV continues to be amazing. When it gets the proper content in the proper context, it blows every little thing else away. It isn’t going to stop declining, nevertheless it shows why it is not going to go away.”
The record-breaking rankings on Thursday show how the streaming and linear mediums can work at the identical time, though the 2 can seem like at odds, Crakes said.
The complementary performance could fit into predictions that corporations may offer consumers cable and streaming offerings under one price tag, as an alternative of fragmenting the 2.
Liberty Media Chairman John Malone said earlier this month that he expects the ad-supported tier of streaming platforms to be bundled with cable plans because cable and streaming “are form of tied to the hip.”
Crakes echoed the sentiment, saying linear and streaming viewing will coexist going forward and possibly get reintegrated into some form of bundle.
“The query is, how do you make the monetization work? We have not figured that part out yet,” Crakes said. “But a part of it is knowing that linear and streaming are co-operative together and that linear can proceed to say no and streaming can proceed to grow. But for the medium run, they clearly go together.”
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.
