Nickelodeon has seen a ratings uptick during the coronavirus outbreak with more people hunkering down at home. Since this past Friday (March 13), Nickelodeon’s portfolio of linear networks have been up 16% with Kids 2-11 compared to the prior four weeks. On Monday, ratings surged 36% over the last four weeks’ average, and were up 15% compared to the same time period last year. Nickelodeon itself has been up 18% compared to the last four weeks, also driven by Monday’s strong rise. Ratings for that day were up 27% over the recent average, and +11% compared to last year.
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Oddly, children's channels in Poland, including Nickelodeon, have not yet seen a ratings increase, even though schools in the country have been closed due to the viral outbreak.
From Deadline:
TV Ratings Climb As People Rediscover Live Linear Viewing Amid Coronavirus-Imposed Stay At Home
March 8 marked the start of Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. Normally, the switch is associated with a Live+Same Day ratings slump for the broadcast networks, especially in the 8 PM hour, as people stay outside longer.
But this year, the week of March 8 marked the turning point in the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., when the threat became real as new cases in the country started skyrocketing and the World Health Organization declaring it a global pandemic. By the end of last week, most companies had instituted work-from-home guidelines, many schools were closed, and restaurants, movie theaters and gyms started to shut down.
As a result of people following the new “social distancing” guidelines and spending more time at home, the typical Daylight Saving Time slump was nonexistent this year. What’s more, broadcast networks have been posting across-the-board, week-to-week, Live+SD ratings increases the likes of which we had not seen in ages, and which had been considered a thing of the past amid the proliferation of streaming.
This past Monday, NBC’s The Voice, an 8 PM show, leaped a whopping 38% (five tenths of a rating point) week-to-week among adults 18-49 (1.8 vs. 1.3) and 1.1 million total viewers (9.67 million vs. 8.73 million) to deliver the highest-rated and most watched Monday or Tuesday edition of the singing competition in a year.
Last night, NBC’s Ellen’s Game of Games, also a 8 PM program, climbed 44% (four tenths) in the demo and added 1.6 million viewers for its best L+SD marks in more than a year. The network’s This Is Us rose three tenths in the demo on Tuesday, while CBS’ Bull and Bob Hearts Abishola posted season highs Monday.
Streaming had been tipped as a major beneficiary of the current mandate for staying home, but viewers — and many of them younger — are also checking out traditional TV.
Primetime PUT (People Using Television) levels among total viewers were up every day last week, with strong week-to-week gains on both Saturday and Sunday night. Monday’s HUTs (Households Using Television) levels were the highest for a Monday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 13).
Daytime and late-night usage levels were also have been up. For instance, since last Friday, Nickelodeon’s portfolio of linear networks have been up 16% with kids 2-11 compared with the prior four weeks.
Ratings experts expect viewing levels’ growth to continue as more people stay home amid expanding restrictions, including quarantines, around the country.
As for any long-term effect, it is too early to say whether younger viewers who discovered appointment viewing on broadcast TV will come back when the outbreak is over. But for the time being the ratings uptick may be the only good news for the networks, which are facing losses from the suspension of most major sports, unfinished seasons as many series shut down over COVID-19 fears before wrapping production, and a pilot-season washout.
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From TheWrap:
Nickelodeon [...] has seen a 20% surge in TV ratings since Monday, [...]
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From MediaPost:
Kids' Viewing On The Rise In The Time Of COVID-19
Reversing some systemic ratings declines, national TV kids' networks have seen gains over the last week, as more children are now home from school due to COVID-19 concerns, according to two different TV research companies.
Nickelodeon is up 7% to 560,000 total day Nielsen-measured viewers for the week ending March 15, while NickToons is up 16% to 110,000 viewers, Boomerang is 5% higher to 89,000 and TeenNick is up 22% to 77,000.
WarnerMedia’s The Cartoon Network -- the second-biggest kids' network -- is down slightly by 2% to 291,000, while Nick Jr. is down 2.4% to 240,000. Disney XD is flat at 69,000, while Universal Kids is up 17% to 34,000 and BabyKids is up 6% to 33,000.
Traditional linear TV networks have seen declines in viewing for years due to growing digital platforms, including YouTube.
Samba TV -- which culls viewing data from smart TV automated content recognition technology -- says that over the same two-week period, TeenNick has seen total time spent on its network by 171%, while DisneyXD is 68% higher, Nicktoons is 66% higher, Nick Jr. has added 32%, and Disney Channel has grown 27%.
Samba TV has a measurement panel of millions of U.S. homes and measures the time spent watching TV across more than 190 networks from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm local time.
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From CBR.com:
Coronavirus Quarantine Causes Spike in Live TV Ratings
With more people staying at home due to coronavirus, television viewership is reaching massive highs across the country.
The quarantine issued in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a sizeable increase in live TV ratings.
According to Deadline, television networks have seen a massive spike in ratings since last week, when the spread of the disease led to a massive response from government bodies. Schools, places of business and other workspaces began shutting down in order to help curb the spread of the disease and people in general began practicing "social distancing" in order to avoid further infection.
There is a clear correlation between the rise in ratings and the fact that the general populace has been spending more time indoors. NBC's The Voice saw a massive 38% jump among viewers in the 18-49 age demographic on Monday night, while another NBC competition show Ellen's Game of Games jumped 44% on Tuesday night. The CBS sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola and legal drama Bull also posted season highs for both shows on Monday. The children's channel Nickelodeon has seen a 16% rise among the 2-11 age demographic since last Friday.
Broadcast networks are in serious need of the high ratings. With multiple sports leagues cancelling their seasons and with production being shut down on shows across the country, television networks are facing serious loses in the face of the pandemic. Current competition continues to be streaming services, which have also seen a rise in viewings.
Ratings experts speculate that the increase will continue to grow as long as the quarantine and restrictions over the disease remain active.
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From Kidscreen:
What are kids watching on lockdown?
PAW Patrol and Star Wars: The Clone Wars are among the most in-demand shows for the past two weeks across Europe and North America.
The past two weeks has seen a massive push towards physicial isolation across Europe and North America, forcing billions of kids to be kept home from school. And while schooling continues for many, there’s also been a spike in home viewership. What’s topping kids’ viewing lists? LA-based Parrot Analytics has found that PAW Patrol is dominating screens in Europe, while SpongeBob SquarePants is most popular across North America.
According to UNESCO, 87% of the world’s children are out of school right now with nationwide closures in more than 160 countries. And kids TV channels are seeing a spike in viewing according to Nielsen—some as high as 58% in the US.
How does that translate to online? Parrot Analytics measured social media interactions, social video views, online research and piracy numbers using a weighted algorithm, to determine demand for the average show (demand being how frequently it’s talked about online or pirated.)
Between March 11 and 23 in Europe, the number one most in-demand show was PAW Patrol (22.35 time more demand than the average show), followed by Peppa Pig (21.27 times), SpongeBob SquarePants (15.15 times), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (pictured, 14.57 times), Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir (13.98 times), Masha and the Bear (12.53 times), Gravity Falls (10.32 times), Steven Universe (10.11 times), My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (9.67 times) and PJ Masks (6.59 times).
Meanwhile, in North America, SpongeBob SquarePants still reigns supreme, like it did for the first three months of the year, at 88.43 times greater demand than the average show. While the top-10 shared some similarities with Europe, such as Steven Universe (60.68 times) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (54.09 time), it also featured a lot of anime, including Dragon Ball Z at number four (40.97 times), while Europe had no shows featuring the Japanese art-style in its top-10 list. Other anime titles on the list included Pokémon (35.46 times) at number six, Avatar: The Last Airbender (30.78 times) at number nine and Naruto: Shippuden (29.71x) at ten.
The rest of the North American top-10 was rounded out by PAW Patrol (35.5 times), Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir (33.52 times), Sesame Street (31.87 times).
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From MediaPost:
There's Still Opportunity In Media Landscape
I’m sure you have seen your own media usage change over the last week or two, now that you’re holed up at home. You’re watching, reading, browsing more.
Traditional TV and cable TV are reaping the benefits of a captive audience consisting of homebound young adults, frazzled parents and bored kids.
Reports Deadline: “Primetime PUT (People Using Television) levels among total viewers were up every day last week, with strong week-to-week gains on both Saturday and Sunday night. Monday’s HUTs (Households Using Television) levels were the highest for a Monday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 13). Daytime and late-night usage levels were also have been up. For instance, since last Friday, Nickelodeon’s portfolio of linear networks has been up 16% with kids 2-11 compared with the prior four weeks.”
Video platforms have also seen significant audience upticks. Per Cheddar: “Americans streamed 85% more minutes of video in March 2020 than in March 2019, according to new Nielsen data.
- The average person has spent 36% more minutes streaming TV and movies in the last four weeks.
- Binge watching (or watching 3+ episodes in one sitting, per the Hulu English Dictionary) has climbed more than 25% over the last two weeks."
Awesome: More eyeballs, so more opportunity to advertise, right? Nope. The Meyers Report writes: “While 89 percent of advertisers have been disrupted by COVID-19, only a third have canceled a campaign outright. The rest are changing their media mix and/or looking to shift their spending into the second half of the year. Despite the shifting of current media dollars, fully 81 percent of advertisers expect to cut ad budgets significantly this year, and 68 percent expect to spend less next year because of the pandemic.”
Some of that makes perfect sense. It’s hard to advertise for products or services that have been impacted by the pandemic, or to audiences that have more pressing matters than thinking about buying a new car or electric toothbrush.
But it’s worth remembering a few important lessons from past economic downturns. Here is a blast from the past, as reported in 2009: “Companies whose ad spending didn't vary according to economic cycles -- based on an analysis of Ad Age data on global ad spending -- also tended to increase their stock prices an average of 1.3 percentage points annually ahead of others from 1986 to 2006.”
So what does all this copy/pasting I just did tell us? First of all, budget cuts and shifts are understandable, especially if you are not able to serve (the majority of) your customers as you used to prior to the shutdown. But at the same time, a hard “cut and run” may not be in your best interest, if you think your business will still be standing when the economy re-emerges at the other end of the tunnel. If you can’t sell a product or service right now, it’s perhaps the time to reinforce your brand values and consumer appreciation.
And if you are still selling or servicing, for you, too, this is the time to benefit from high supply and lowered demand in the media market. There might be real opportunities for advertisers looking for some presence.
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From Variety:
More Screen Time During Lockdown? Not for These Kids Cable Channels
Even if parents are going batty trying to keep their little ones entertained while cooped up at home during this pandemic, they’re not necessarily plunking the kids in front of the TV — not linear TV at least. Meanwhile, certain streaming services are seeing a lift in interest, underscoring the next generation’s shift in television viewing habits.
For the week of March 23-29, viewership of ad-supported kids’ linear cable networks — a group that includes Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney XD and others — slid 3% from the comparable week in March 2019, according to Bernstein research analysts, citing Nielsen figures. And that year-over-year decline actually marks a major improvement: prior to shelter-in-place measures being implemented, weekly viewership of those channels among 2- to 11-year-olds had been plummeting an average of 25% since the start of 2020.
“Even though the rate of decline significantly decelerated, it’s still in negative territory even though time available in front of TV is arguably as large as it can be,” wrote Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger on Monday. “It’s very likely that kids’ linear TV continues to lose significant share vs. other forms of entertainment, namely [subscription video on demand] services and video games.”
For comparison, looking at viewership metrics that span the entire day (which is how kids cable network viewing is tracked), broadcast network viewership rose 9% and cable tune-in increased 2%, said the firm. (By their usual primetime-only measurements, broadcast was flat vs. last year, while cable slid 10%, with ESPN in particular taking a massive knock from the lack of live sports on TV.)
By Juenger’s count, the week of March 23 was the second week that major U.S. metropolitan areas felt the impact of stay-at-home coronavirus guidance, though most states didn’t issue official advisories until at least mid- to late March — California ordered residents to shelter in place beginning March 19, Illinois on March 21, New York on March 22, Washington state on March 23, Virginia on March 25, and Texas on April 2, for instance. Nielsen data from the first week of April should show an even fuller picture of how much linear TV people are watching while in lockdown mode.
Attempts at homeschooling aside, parents have options for keeping preschoolers and grade schoolers from bouncing off the walls. The last few weeks have seen museums, zoos, educational organizations and entertainment outlets alike offer up a bevy of distance-learning resources to keep kids preoccupied while in the house. National Geographic, for one, launched NatGeo@Home, while PBS Kids created a weekday newsletter filled with suggested activities. Nickelodeon rolled out a multiplatform initiative, #KidsTogether, that includes short-form videos of, say, SpongeBob practicing social distancing.
Last week’s viewership stats mean that even with the nation’s children home from school for the time being and the New York Times allowing that parents can “Just Give Them the Screens (for Now),” linear cable is in a challenged spot.
Cartoon Network viewing fell 6.2% from the prior-year for the week of March 23. ViacomCBS-owned Nickelodeon saw a 15% year-over-year drop in viewership and Nicktoons slid around 12-13%, while Nick Jr. popped nearly 25%.
The dip in the former two Nick channels can arguably be chalked up to the platform and not the content: In March, Nickelodeon’s “The Legend of Korra” and “Danny Phantom” were among the children’s series with the highest volume of streams and time spent on subscription streaming service CBS All Access, alongside “Bob the Builder.” And Nickelodeon’s Noggin app saw 11% month-over-month growth in paid subscribers in March and a 40% jump in free trial sign-ups.
CBS All Access, which just a few months ago ventured into the kid programming space (including originals), tells Variety it has seen a more than 30% month-over-month increase in both daily average streams and time spent watching children’s programming in March. “Polly Pocket,” “Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventure” and “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” are seeing their “largest percentage growth to date,” per a spokesperson for the service. (Overall, All Access says March was its most-streamed month in existence.)
Meanwhile, Disney Plus is seeing a bump in interest as well. While the five-month-old streamer has not released viewership data, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the service on March 13 — the day that the Walt Disney Co. announced that it would release the movie “Frozen 2” to the streaming service three months earlier than planned, in order to offer “some fun and joy during this challenging period.” (Netflix declined to comment on its viewership trends over the past month.)
But it’s not all bad news for traditional cablers. At least for Disney, a focus on its new streamer doesn’t seem to be detracting from its linear cable presence; Disney XD viewership notched up over 5% the week of March 23 — a reversal in trend from the weeks leading up to that.
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From Forbes:
ViacomCBS’ Downward Spiral Is Accelerating As Talk Of Unraveling Grows
Just a few months ago, Shari Redstone was basking in the triumph of a lifetime. After decades of lawsuits, bitter sniping, cruel insults and brutal boardroom warfare, the 65-year-old billionaire’s daughter had wrested control of her father’s media empire from a coterie of powerful enemies, putting a newly merged ViacomCBS under her control.
Newly ensconced in her father’s old office, 52 stories above New York’s Times Square, Redstone—once belittled as a “daddy’s girl”—had battled her way to a legitimate claim of being the media industry’s most powerful woman. Six months later, that victory lap has turned into a strenuous uphill climb. And the coronavirus pandemic has just handed her a large bag of rocks.
“The merger was a huge mistake,” says Craig Huber, of Huber Research Partners. “They should have sold Viacom many years ago, rather than saddle CBS with it.”
The combined businesses issued their first report card in February, delivering a loss from continued operations of $273 million on revenue of $6.9 billion, a 3% drop over the prior year. They’ve also lagged behind their peers in launching a subscription streaming service that could compete with Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Warner Media’s HBO Max.
Future reports were not expected to be much better even before coronavirus lockdowns put a freeze on entertainment and sports businesses. Then came the cancellation of the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament and with it ad revenue of more than $1 billion, which would have been divided between the two rights holders, CBS and Turner.
“The underlying problem here is that, despite $28 billion in revenues, the company generates a paltry amount of free cash flow,” the research firm MoffettNathanson wrote in a report published March 27. “It is mind-boggling to figure out where the cash flow is actually.”
It’s not likely to be found soon. The Paramount film studio can’t make movies right now, nor can it collect revenue from showing those that it has produced since theaters are largely closed. Furthermore, veteran media analyst Harold Vogel wrote last week that the company’s $18.7 billion of debt at year-end was “too high for comfort,” with $800 million of it coming due in the next year. “Cash flow in support of this debt is a relative trickle of what it ought to be at this stage,” he wrote.
Pressure is mounting for management to act. The problem is there are few good options.
ViacomCBS shares plummeted 18% the day after the February earnings report came out and have fallen another 48% since. Valued at about $25 billion after the merger, the combined businesses are now trading at a market capitalization of less than $10 billion. There are plans underway to sell off its book publishing arm, Simon & Schuster, but many are advocating the sale of far larger assets, like Showtime Networks or Paramount (whose titles include Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Star Trek), to shore up its balance sheet.
Neither is likely without a struggle, considering how former CEO Philippe Dauman fell out of favor with Sumner Redstone when he suggested in 2016 that Sumner sell a piece of Paramount, reportedly at a valuation as high as $5.5 billion. Any major transaction would also require signoff from Shari Redstone, who spent years fighting to combine and ultimately control the businesses.
“That was always Sumner’s issue, is that he fought so hard to put everything together that he never wanted to take it apart,” says another former Viacom executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I think that Shari probably feels the same way.”
In addition to the woes at Paramount, cable networks Nickelodeon and MTV, once at the pinnacle of cultural relevance, are bleeding viewers. As of February, Nickelodeon had lost 44% of its audience in the past five years; MTV has also hemorrhaged viewers and revenue and is working to rebuild. The profitability of CBS’ legacy networks (almost entirely Showtime) dropped 8% in 2018 and 22% in the first nine months of 2019, according to MoffettNathanson, while last year it increased production volume by 30%, a move the research firm called “largely ill advised.”
On ViacomCBS’ February earnings call, CEO Bob Bakish admitted that Showtime was a “working capital headwind for the company” in 2019, but emphasized that he planned to improve cost efficiency across the business.
ViacomCBS declined to comment for this story.
Adding to cost pressures are the upcoming negotiations for the rights to air NFL football on CBS and a network carriage deal with Dish, the U.S. satellite network, both critical gets. CBS has a 10-year NFL agreement that expires in 2023 and may need to be renegotiated sooner, a scenario with “no good outcome,” according to Huber. Either it will lose out on the right to air games—a disaster—or it will pay huge fees, which will further eat into margins.
Meanwhile, past deals by CBS to provide some of its premium content to Netflix, including NCIS and Criminal Minds, “likely played a role in their own demise,” according to MoffettNathanson, by limiting the appeal of CBS All Access, the company’s flagship streaming service, which has 16 million paying subscribers.
The bright spots are few. Management shake-ups have slowed and Redstone has a seemingly solid partnership with Bob Bakish, a Viacom veteran who took over as CEO in 2016. Pluto TV, the ad-supported streaming service Viacom bought last year for $340 million expects to end 2020 with 30 million (unpaid) monthly active users, compared to at least 28 million current subscribers at Disney+ and over 167 million at Netflix, which are collecting monthly fees from all of them. Hulu, also controlled by Disney, has more than 30 million paying subscribers. Still, ViacomCBS enjoys sustained cultural relevance overseas with the likes of Nickelodeon and MTV, including in Europe and South America.
Help could come from a viable new film franchise that could challenge Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises, or the DC Comics superhero films from Warner Bros., for instance. Or one of the networks could find a breakthrough television show. But ViacomCBS is already spending $13 billion on new programming, roughly the same spend as Netflix, which is now calling the shots in Hollywood. In recent years Netflix has put out groundbreaking content like Stranger Things, Marriage Story, Tiger King and Narcos.
The company could also stem some of the bleeding by merging CBS All Access with a competitor like NBCUniversal’s Peacock or Hulu. The conglomerate has a more existential problem, though, being a “pigmy among giants,” according to Vogel, which has left it looking like a sitting duck for a well-funded buyer like Amazon, Apple or Netflix, or even a hedge fund that may see value in buying the whole thing and chopping it up for parts.
Said one large ViacomCBS shareholder in a February email to Forbes: “Almost certainly the sum of the parts valuation here is well in excess [of] like double the public market value of the stock.”
“The realization of Shari’s quest to merge Viacom and CBS is now completely irrelevant,” adds a former board member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “What the company needs to do urgently is to shore up its weak financial position by eliminating its dividend, following Disney’s lead in cutting executive compensation, and selling assets. The survival of ViacomCBS as a viable media player, or even as a viable company, is at stake.”
The largest recipient of those dividend payments is National Amusements, which is already facing liquidity pressure. Primarily in the movie theater business, it has been largely shut down to avoid the spread of coronavirus. According to S&P Global Ratings, which downgraded the firm’s credit rating earlier this month, National Amusements is “dependent on its dividend income to service its debt.” S&P adds that the company “could face a potential liquidity crisis if theaters remain closed beyond August.”
The fate of National Amusements is critical. It holds a 79% voting stake in ViacomCBS. Sumner—96 and ailing—has an 80% stake in National Amusements, which will be divided in two on his passing. Half will go to half for the benefit of his descendants, whose trustees will include Shari and her son as well as others with long ties to members of the family, including divorce lawyers for Sumner and his former wife, Phyllis, and a National Amusements executive. The other trust will be for the benefit of Phyllis.
Shari Redstone is showing no signs of backing down. She purchased $2 million worth of ViacomCBS shares in the last two months and, as she told us in September when discussing her battle for the family business, not one who worries much about outside opinions: “No matter how hard or challenging it got, I tried to keep my head down, fight for what was right and not read the press.”
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More Nick:Nickelodeon Launches #KidsTogether--A Global Prosocial Initiative to Help Kids and Families Stay Informed and Engaged With Activities; Noggin to be Offered Free to Kids in Need in Partnership with National Head Start Association and First Book
NickALive!'s full coverage of how coronavirus is affecting Nickelodeon can be found here.
Originally published: Thursday, March 19, 2020 at 00:52 GMT.
Original source: Deadline.
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon News and Highlights!
Oddly, children's channels in Poland, including Nickelodeon, have not yet seen a ratings increase, even though schools in the country have been closed due to the viral outbreak.
From Deadline:
TV Ratings Climb As People Rediscover Live Linear Viewing Amid Coronavirus-Imposed Stay At Home
March 8 marked the start of Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. Normally, the switch is associated with a Live+Same Day ratings slump for the broadcast networks, especially in the 8 PM hour, as people stay outside longer.
But this year, the week of March 8 marked the turning point in the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., when the threat became real as new cases in the country started skyrocketing and the World Health Organization declaring it a global pandemic. By the end of last week, most companies had instituted work-from-home guidelines, many schools were closed, and restaurants, movie theaters and gyms started to shut down.
As a result of people following the new “social distancing” guidelines and spending more time at home, the typical Daylight Saving Time slump was nonexistent this year. What’s more, broadcast networks have been posting across-the-board, week-to-week, Live+SD ratings increases the likes of which we had not seen in ages, and which had been considered a thing of the past amid the proliferation of streaming.
This past Monday, NBC’s The Voice, an 8 PM show, leaped a whopping 38% (five tenths of a rating point) week-to-week among adults 18-49 (1.8 vs. 1.3) and 1.1 million total viewers (9.67 million vs. 8.73 million) to deliver the highest-rated and most watched Monday or Tuesday edition of the singing competition in a year.
Last night, NBC’s Ellen’s Game of Games, also a 8 PM program, climbed 44% (four tenths) in the demo and added 1.6 million viewers for its best L+SD marks in more than a year. The network’s This Is Us rose three tenths in the demo on Tuesday, while CBS’ Bull and Bob Hearts Abishola posted season highs Monday.
Streaming had been tipped as a major beneficiary of the current mandate for staying home, but viewers — and many of them younger — are also checking out traditional TV.
Primetime PUT (People Using Television) levels among total viewers were up every day last week, with strong week-to-week gains on both Saturday and Sunday night. Monday’s HUTs (Households Using Television) levels were the highest for a Monday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 13).
Daytime and late-night usage levels were also have been up. For instance, since last Friday, Nickelodeon’s portfolio of linear networks have been up 16% with kids 2-11 compared with the prior four weeks.
Ratings experts expect viewing levels’ growth to continue as more people stay home amid expanding restrictions, including quarantines, around the country.
As for any long-term effect, it is too early to say whether younger viewers who discovered appointment viewing on broadcast TV will come back when the outbreak is over. But for the time being the ratings uptick may be the only good news for the networks, which are facing losses from the suspension of most major sports, unfinished seasons as many series shut down over COVID-19 fears before wrapping production, and a pilot-season washout.
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From TheWrap:
Nickelodeon [...] has seen a 20% surge in TV ratings since Monday, [...]
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From MediaPost:
Kids' Viewing On The Rise In The Time Of COVID-19
Reversing some systemic ratings declines, national TV kids' networks have seen gains over the last week, as more children are now home from school due to COVID-19 concerns, according to two different TV research companies.
Nickelodeon is up 7% to 560,000 total day Nielsen-measured viewers for the week ending March 15, while NickToons is up 16% to 110,000 viewers, Boomerang is 5% higher to 89,000 and TeenNick is up 22% to 77,000.
WarnerMedia’s The Cartoon Network -- the second-biggest kids' network -- is down slightly by 2% to 291,000, while Nick Jr. is down 2.4% to 240,000. Disney XD is flat at 69,000, while Universal Kids is up 17% to 34,000 and BabyKids is up 6% to 33,000.
Traditional linear TV networks have seen declines in viewing for years due to growing digital platforms, including YouTube.
Samba TV -- which culls viewing data from smart TV automated content recognition technology -- says that over the same two-week period, TeenNick has seen total time spent on its network by 171%, while DisneyXD is 68% higher, Nicktoons is 66% higher, Nick Jr. has added 32%, and Disney Channel has grown 27%.
Samba TV has a measurement panel of millions of U.S. homes and measures the time spent watching TV across more than 190 networks from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm local time.
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From CBR.com:
Coronavirus Quarantine Causes Spike in Live TV Ratings
With more people staying at home due to coronavirus, television viewership is reaching massive highs across the country.
The quarantine issued in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a sizeable increase in live TV ratings.
According to Deadline, television networks have seen a massive spike in ratings since last week, when the spread of the disease led to a massive response from government bodies. Schools, places of business and other workspaces began shutting down in order to help curb the spread of the disease and people in general began practicing "social distancing" in order to avoid further infection.
There is a clear correlation between the rise in ratings and the fact that the general populace has been spending more time indoors. NBC's The Voice saw a massive 38% jump among viewers in the 18-49 age demographic on Monday night, while another NBC competition show Ellen's Game of Games jumped 44% on Tuesday night. The CBS sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola and legal drama Bull also posted season highs for both shows on Monday. The children's channel Nickelodeon has seen a 16% rise among the 2-11 age demographic since last Friday.
Broadcast networks are in serious need of the high ratings. With multiple sports leagues cancelling their seasons and with production being shut down on shows across the country, television networks are facing serious loses in the face of the pandemic. Current competition continues to be streaming services, which have also seen a rise in viewings.
Ratings experts speculate that the increase will continue to grow as long as the quarantine and restrictions over the disease remain active.
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From Kidscreen:
What are kids watching on lockdown?
PAW Patrol and Star Wars: The Clone Wars are among the most in-demand shows for the past two weeks across Europe and North America.
The past two weeks has seen a massive push towards physicial isolation across Europe and North America, forcing billions of kids to be kept home from school. And while schooling continues for many, there’s also been a spike in home viewership. What’s topping kids’ viewing lists? LA-based Parrot Analytics has found that PAW Patrol is dominating screens in Europe, while SpongeBob SquarePants is most popular across North America.
According to UNESCO, 87% of the world’s children are out of school right now with nationwide closures in more than 160 countries. And kids TV channels are seeing a spike in viewing according to Nielsen—some as high as 58% in the US.
How does that translate to online? Parrot Analytics measured social media interactions, social video views, online research and piracy numbers using a weighted algorithm, to determine demand for the average show (demand being how frequently it’s talked about online or pirated.)
Between March 11 and 23 in Europe, the number one most in-demand show was PAW Patrol (22.35 time more demand than the average show), followed by Peppa Pig (21.27 times), SpongeBob SquarePants (15.15 times), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (pictured, 14.57 times), Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir (13.98 times), Masha and the Bear (12.53 times), Gravity Falls (10.32 times), Steven Universe (10.11 times), My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (9.67 times) and PJ Masks (6.59 times).
Meanwhile, in North America, SpongeBob SquarePants still reigns supreme, like it did for the first three months of the year, at 88.43 times greater demand than the average show. While the top-10 shared some similarities with Europe, such as Steven Universe (60.68 times) and Star Wars: The Clone Wars (54.09 time), it also featured a lot of anime, including Dragon Ball Z at number four (40.97 times), while Europe had no shows featuring the Japanese art-style in its top-10 list. Other anime titles on the list included Pokémon (35.46 times) at number six, Avatar: The Last Airbender (30.78 times) at number nine and Naruto: Shippuden (29.71x) at ten.
The rest of the North American top-10 was rounded out by PAW Patrol (35.5 times), Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir (33.52 times), Sesame Street (31.87 times).
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From MediaPost:
There's Still Opportunity In Media Landscape
I’m sure you have seen your own media usage change over the last week or two, now that you’re holed up at home. You’re watching, reading, browsing more.
Traditional TV and cable TV are reaping the benefits of a captive audience consisting of homebound young adults, frazzled parents and bored kids.
Reports Deadline: “Primetime PUT (People Using Television) levels among total viewers were up every day last week, with strong week-to-week gains on both Saturday and Sunday night. Monday’s HUTs (Households Using Television) levels were the highest for a Monday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 13). Daytime and late-night usage levels were also have been up. For instance, since last Friday, Nickelodeon’s portfolio of linear networks has been up 16% with kids 2-11 compared with the prior four weeks.”
Video platforms have also seen significant audience upticks. Per Cheddar: “Americans streamed 85% more minutes of video in March 2020 than in March 2019, according to new Nielsen data.
- The average person has spent 36% more minutes streaming TV and movies in the last four weeks.
- Binge watching (or watching 3+ episodes in one sitting, per the Hulu English Dictionary) has climbed more than 25% over the last two weeks."
Awesome: More eyeballs, so more opportunity to advertise, right? Nope. The Meyers Report writes: “While 89 percent of advertisers have been disrupted by COVID-19, only a third have canceled a campaign outright. The rest are changing their media mix and/or looking to shift their spending into the second half of the year. Despite the shifting of current media dollars, fully 81 percent of advertisers expect to cut ad budgets significantly this year, and 68 percent expect to spend less next year because of the pandemic.”
Some of that makes perfect sense. It’s hard to advertise for products or services that have been impacted by the pandemic, or to audiences that have more pressing matters than thinking about buying a new car or electric toothbrush.
But it’s worth remembering a few important lessons from past economic downturns. Here is a blast from the past, as reported in 2009: “Companies whose ad spending didn't vary according to economic cycles -- based on an analysis of Ad Age data on global ad spending -- also tended to increase their stock prices an average of 1.3 percentage points annually ahead of others from 1986 to 2006.”
So what does all this copy/pasting I just did tell us? First of all, budget cuts and shifts are understandable, especially if you are not able to serve (the majority of) your customers as you used to prior to the shutdown. But at the same time, a hard “cut and run” may not be in your best interest, if you think your business will still be standing when the economy re-emerges at the other end of the tunnel. If you can’t sell a product or service right now, it’s perhaps the time to reinforce your brand values and consumer appreciation.
And if you are still selling or servicing, for you, too, this is the time to benefit from high supply and lowered demand in the media market. There might be real opportunities for advertisers looking for some presence.
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From Variety:
More Screen Time During Lockdown? Not for These Kids Cable Channels
Even if parents are going batty trying to keep their little ones entertained while cooped up at home during this pandemic, they’re not necessarily plunking the kids in front of the TV — not linear TV at least. Meanwhile, certain streaming services are seeing a lift in interest, underscoring the next generation’s shift in television viewing habits.
For the week of March 23-29, viewership of ad-supported kids’ linear cable networks — a group that includes Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney XD and others — slid 3% from the comparable week in March 2019, according to Bernstein research analysts, citing Nielsen figures. And that year-over-year decline actually marks a major improvement: prior to shelter-in-place measures being implemented, weekly viewership of those channels among 2- to 11-year-olds had been plummeting an average of 25% since the start of 2020.
“Even though the rate of decline significantly decelerated, it’s still in negative territory even though time available in front of TV is arguably as large as it can be,” wrote Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger on Monday. “It’s very likely that kids’ linear TV continues to lose significant share vs. other forms of entertainment, namely [subscription video on demand] services and video games.”
For comparison, looking at viewership metrics that span the entire day (which is how kids cable network viewing is tracked), broadcast network viewership rose 9% and cable tune-in increased 2%, said the firm. (By their usual primetime-only measurements, broadcast was flat vs. last year, while cable slid 10%, with ESPN in particular taking a massive knock from the lack of live sports on TV.)
By Juenger’s count, the week of March 23 was the second week that major U.S. metropolitan areas felt the impact of stay-at-home coronavirus guidance, though most states didn’t issue official advisories until at least mid- to late March — California ordered residents to shelter in place beginning March 19, Illinois on March 21, New York on March 22, Washington state on March 23, Virginia on March 25, and Texas on April 2, for instance. Nielsen data from the first week of April should show an even fuller picture of how much linear TV people are watching while in lockdown mode.
Attempts at homeschooling aside, parents have options for keeping preschoolers and grade schoolers from bouncing off the walls. The last few weeks have seen museums, zoos, educational organizations and entertainment outlets alike offer up a bevy of distance-learning resources to keep kids preoccupied while in the house. National Geographic, for one, launched NatGeo@Home, while PBS Kids created a weekday newsletter filled with suggested activities. Nickelodeon rolled out a multiplatform initiative, #KidsTogether, that includes short-form videos of, say, SpongeBob practicing social distancing.
Last week’s viewership stats mean that even with the nation’s children home from school for the time being and the New York Times allowing that parents can “Just Give Them the Screens (for Now),” linear cable is in a challenged spot.
Cartoon Network viewing fell 6.2% from the prior-year for the week of March 23. ViacomCBS-owned Nickelodeon saw a 15% year-over-year drop in viewership and Nicktoons slid around 12-13%, while Nick Jr. popped nearly 25%.
The dip in the former two Nick channels can arguably be chalked up to the platform and not the content: In March, Nickelodeon’s “The Legend of Korra” and “Danny Phantom” were among the children’s series with the highest volume of streams and time spent on subscription streaming service CBS All Access, alongside “Bob the Builder.” And Nickelodeon’s Noggin app saw 11% month-over-month growth in paid subscribers in March and a 40% jump in free trial sign-ups.
CBS All Access, which just a few months ago ventured into the kid programming space (including originals), tells Variety it has seen a more than 30% month-over-month increase in both daily average streams and time spent watching children’s programming in March. “Polly Pocket,” “Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventure” and “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” are seeing their “largest percentage growth to date,” per a spokesperson for the service. (Overall, All Access says March was its most-streamed month in existence.)
Meanwhile, Disney Plus is seeing a bump in interest as well. While the five-month-old streamer has not released viewership data, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the service on March 13 — the day that the Walt Disney Co. announced that it would release the movie “Frozen 2” to the streaming service three months earlier than planned, in order to offer “some fun and joy during this challenging period.” (Netflix declined to comment on its viewership trends over the past month.)
But it’s not all bad news for traditional cablers. At least for Disney, a focus on its new streamer doesn’t seem to be detracting from its linear cable presence; Disney XD viewership notched up over 5% the week of March 23 — a reversal in trend from the weeks leading up to that.
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From Forbes:
ViacomCBS’ Downward Spiral Is Accelerating As Talk Of Unraveling Grows
Just a few months ago, Shari Redstone was basking in the triumph of a lifetime. After decades of lawsuits, bitter sniping, cruel insults and brutal boardroom warfare, the 65-year-old billionaire’s daughter had wrested control of her father’s media empire from a coterie of powerful enemies, putting a newly merged ViacomCBS under her control.
Newly ensconced in her father’s old office, 52 stories above New York’s Times Square, Redstone—once belittled as a “daddy’s girl”—had battled her way to a legitimate claim of being the media industry’s most powerful woman. Six months later, that victory lap has turned into a strenuous uphill climb. And the coronavirus pandemic has just handed her a large bag of rocks.
“The merger was a huge mistake,” says Craig Huber, of Huber Research Partners. “They should have sold Viacom many years ago, rather than saddle CBS with it.”
The combined businesses issued their first report card in February, delivering a loss from continued operations of $273 million on revenue of $6.9 billion, a 3% drop over the prior year. They’ve also lagged behind their peers in launching a subscription streaming service that could compete with Disney+, Netflix, Hulu, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Warner Media’s HBO Max.
Future reports were not expected to be much better even before coronavirus lockdowns put a freeze on entertainment and sports businesses. Then came the cancellation of the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament and with it ad revenue of more than $1 billion, which would have been divided between the two rights holders, CBS and Turner.
“The underlying problem here is that, despite $28 billion in revenues, the company generates a paltry amount of free cash flow,” the research firm MoffettNathanson wrote in a report published March 27. “It is mind-boggling to figure out where the cash flow is actually.”
It’s not likely to be found soon. The Paramount film studio can’t make movies right now, nor can it collect revenue from showing those that it has produced since theaters are largely closed. Furthermore, veteran media analyst Harold Vogel wrote last week that the company’s $18.7 billion of debt at year-end was “too high for comfort,” with $800 million of it coming due in the next year. “Cash flow in support of this debt is a relative trickle of what it ought to be at this stage,” he wrote.
Pressure is mounting for management to act. The problem is there are few good options.
ViacomCBS shares plummeted 18% the day after the February earnings report came out and have fallen another 48% since. Valued at about $25 billion after the merger, the combined businesses are now trading at a market capitalization of less than $10 billion. There are plans underway to sell off its book publishing arm, Simon & Schuster, but many are advocating the sale of far larger assets, like Showtime Networks or Paramount (whose titles include Top Gun, Mission Impossible and Star Trek), to shore up its balance sheet.
Neither is likely without a struggle, considering how former CEO Philippe Dauman fell out of favor with Sumner Redstone when he suggested in 2016 that Sumner sell a piece of Paramount, reportedly at a valuation as high as $5.5 billion. Any major transaction would also require signoff from Shari Redstone, who spent years fighting to combine and ultimately control the businesses.
“That was always Sumner’s issue, is that he fought so hard to put everything together that he never wanted to take it apart,” says another former Viacom executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I think that Shari probably feels the same way.”
In addition to the woes at Paramount, cable networks Nickelodeon and MTV, once at the pinnacle of cultural relevance, are bleeding viewers. As of February, Nickelodeon had lost 44% of its audience in the past five years; MTV has also hemorrhaged viewers and revenue and is working to rebuild. The profitability of CBS’ legacy networks (almost entirely Showtime) dropped 8% in 2018 and 22% in the first nine months of 2019, according to MoffettNathanson, while last year it increased production volume by 30%, a move the research firm called “largely ill advised.”
On ViacomCBS’ February earnings call, CEO Bob Bakish admitted that Showtime was a “working capital headwind for the company” in 2019, but emphasized that he planned to improve cost efficiency across the business.
ViacomCBS declined to comment for this story.
Adding to cost pressures are the upcoming negotiations for the rights to air NFL football on CBS and a network carriage deal with Dish, the U.S. satellite network, both critical gets. CBS has a 10-year NFL agreement that expires in 2023 and may need to be renegotiated sooner, a scenario with “no good outcome,” according to Huber. Either it will lose out on the right to air games—a disaster—or it will pay huge fees, which will further eat into margins.
Meanwhile, past deals by CBS to provide some of its premium content to Netflix, including NCIS and Criminal Minds, “likely played a role in their own demise,” according to MoffettNathanson, by limiting the appeal of CBS All Access, the company’s flagship streaming service, which has 16 million paying subscribers.
The bright spots are few. Management shake-ups have slowed and Redstone has a seemingly solid partnership with Bob Bakish, a Viacom veteran who took over as CEO in 2016. Pluto TV, the ad-supported streaming service Viacom bought last year for $340 million expects to end 2020 with 30 million (unpaid) monthly active users, compared to at least 28 million current subscribers at Disney+ and over 167 million at Netflix, which are collecting monthly fees from all of them. Hulu, also controlled by Disney, has more than 30 million paying subscribers. Still, ViacomCBS enjoys sustained cultural relevance overseas with the likes of Nickelodeon and MTV, including in Europe and South America.
Help could come from a viable new film franchise that could challenge Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises, or the DC Comics superhero films from Warner Bros., for instance. Or one of the networks could find a breakthrough television show. But ViacomCBS is already spending $13 billion on new programming, roughly the same spend as Netflix, which is now calling the shots in Hollywood. In recent years Netflix has put out groundbreaking content like Stranger Things, Marriage Story, Tiger King and Narcos.
The company could also stem some of the bleeding by merging CBS All Access with a competitor like NBCUniversal’s Peacock or Hulu. The conglomerate has a more existential problem, though, being a “pigmy among giants,” according to Vogel, which has left it looking like a sitting duck for a well-funded buyer like Amazon, Apple or Netflix, or even a hedge fund that may see value in buying the whole thing and chopping it up for parts.
Said one large ViacomCBS shareholder in a February email to Forbes: “Almost certainly the sum of the parts valuation here is well in excess [of] like double the public market value of the stock.”
“The realization of Shari’s quest to merge Viacom and CBS is now completely irrelevant,” adds a former board member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “What the company needs to do urgently is to shore up its weak financial position by eliminating its dividend, following Disney’s lead in cutting executive compensation, and selling assets. The survival of ViacomCBS as a viable media player, or even as a viable company, is at stake.”
The largest recipient of those dividend payments is National Amusements, which is already facing liquidity pressure. Primarily in the movie theater business, it has been largely shut down to avoid the spread of coronavirus. According to S&P Global Ratings, which downgraded the firm’s credit rating earlier this month, National Amusements is “dependent on its dividend income to service its debt.” S&P adds that the company “could face a potential liquidity crisis if theaters remain closed beyond August.”
The fate of National Amusements is critical. It holds a 79% voting stake in ViacomCBS. Sumner—96 and ailing—has an 80% stake in National Amusements, which will be divided in two on his passing. Half will go to half for the benefit of his descendants, whose trustees will include Shari and her son as well as others with long ties to members of the family, including divorce lawyers for Sumner and his former wife, Phyllis, and a National Amusements executive. The other trust will be for the benefit of Phyllis.
Shari Redstone is showing no signs of backing down. She purchased $2 million worth of ViacomCBS shares in the last two months and, as she told us in September when discussing her battle for the family business, not one who worries much about outside opinions: “No matter how hard or challenging it got, I tried to keep my head down, fight for what was right and not read the press.”
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More Nick:Nickelodeon Launches #KidsTogether--A Global Prosocial Initiative to Help Kids and Families Stay Informed and Engaged With Activities; Noggin to be Offered Free to Kids in Need in Partnership with National Head Start Association and First Book
NickALive!'s full coverage of how coronavirus is affecting Nickelodeon can be found here.
Originally published: Thursday, March 19, 2020 at 00:52 GMT.
Original source: Deadline.
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