Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 2023: Birds Of A Feather Stream Together – Peacock Float
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Thanksgiving TV viewership gave media firms so much to be glad about this yr.
A spread of events over the vacation broke ratings records.
NBC drew an all-time record 28.5 million viewers this yr during its broadcast of the 97th annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, up 6% from last yr, 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 ratings monster over the vacation.
CBS’ Thanksgiving broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys’ win over the Washington Commanders was probably the most watched program on any network since Super Bowl LVII earlier this yr, 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 yr’s CBS Thanksgiving game, but got here in about 500,000 viewers lower than last yr’s Cowboys-Giants matchup within the comparable timeslot.
While CBS didn’t release ratings 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, probably the most watched Thanksgiving Day game ever for the 12:30 p.m. ET timeslot and up 6% from the comparable game last yr, the network said Tuesday. Fox, unlike its competitors, doesn’t have a dedicated streaming platform for its predominant 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 26.9 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 yr. The corporate paid a reported $100 million to broadcast the Recent York Jets and Miami Dolphins matchup the day after Thanksgiving, in hopes that the Black Friday NFL game would turn into a convention on Amazon’s Prime Video platform. The hefty price tag adds to the $1 billion per yr 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 yr. Ratings numbers for the Friday game haven’t yet been released.
“It could make sense that it isn’t going to do in addition to the Thursday games since it’s a distinct platform on a distinct day,” said sports media consultant and former Fox Sports executive Patrick Crakes. “That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have lots 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 or not 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 information analytics firm EDO Inc.
“The ratings 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.
![Consumers responded 'very aggressively' to big discount ads this year, says EDO Inc.'s Kevin Krim](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/107339260-17010932911701093288-32206110440-1080pnbcnews.jpg?v=1701093291&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y)
Traditional TV’s Thanksgiving ratings 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 need to suffer for streaming to capture strong ratings, and vice versa.
“Everybody knows where to seek out the NFL,” said Crakes. “It shows that the ability of traditional TV continues to be amazing. When it gets the correct content in the correct context, it blows all the things else away. It is not going to stop declining, but it surely shows why it isn’t going to go away.”
The record-breaking ratings 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 firms 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 type of tied to the hip.”
Crakes echoed the sentiment, saying linear and streaming viewing will coexist going forward and doubtless get reintegrated into some type of bundle.
“The query is, how do you make the monetization work? We’ve 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.