Olympics Captured 26% of Last Week’s Live, Linear TV Viewing Time

Data & MeasurementSports
Written By Eleanor Semeraro

Welcome to our weekly snapshot of TV by the numbers, highlighting the most-watched shows and networks for July 29 through August 4, 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).

The Olympics are in full swing and viewers are eagerly tuning in: Over a quarter of all minutes watched last week were spent on coverage of the games across various networks. Elsewhere in sports, MLB games captured a 1.40% viewership share, a decrease from the previous week’s 1.70% share. 

Some additional highlights around the top TV programming: 

  • NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt makes it into the top five (up from No. 13 previously), accounting for 0.61% of watch-time. 

  • NFL excitement is already kicking off, with the preseason Hall of Fame game between the Chicago Bears and Houston Texans catching a 0.41% viewership share. 

  • Thanks to reruns on TBS, both Friends and The Big Bang Theory move up the ranking week-over-week, taking No. 16 and No. 23, respectively. 

  • SpongeBob SquarePants was a week-over-week chart newcomer, landing at No. 21 with 0.38% of minutes watched. 

NBC is again the TV network leader — check out the full ranking on The Measure. 

Eleanor Semeraro

Eleanor is an entertainment analyst and marketing strategist with a passion for all things TV and social media. She’s a regular TV[R]EV contributor and consults for small businesses within the advertising and entertainment data analytics ecosystem.

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