NFL, College Football Scores: Big January for Linear, Streaming

• by Wayne Friedman , 9 hours ago

Backed by football -- both the NFL and college -- TV viewing of persons two years and older climbed to 12-month high in January 2026, according to Nielsen’s Total TV/Streaming Snapshot.

But live, legacy TV networks and streaming platforms continued their share trends of the market, respectively, of overall decline and ascending year-over-year.

Broadcast dipped one percentage point to 21.5% (from 22.5%), while cable was down 3.2 percentage points to 21.2% (from 24.4%). All the while streaming rose 4.4 percentage points to 47% share.

On a month-to-month basis (January 2026 to December 2025), both broadcast and cable rose with high-performing sports.

For broadcasts, the NFL accounted for the top 15 telecasts.

On the cable side, ESPN witnessed an increase of 82% in its sports programming, with news networks climbing 17% for Fox News Channel and CNN up by 29%.

Looking at ESPN and Fox News together, the two channels pulled in 21% of all cable TV viewing.

Streaming witnessed a 3% hike in total viewing from December, and 10% higher share versus January 2025.

A number of streamers showed year-over-year gains. YouTube remained in the top spot with 12.5% (vs. 10.8% in January 2025), while Netflix was next at 8.8% (versus 8.6%) and Disney, for all its platforms, came in at 4.9% (4.7%), while Prime Video had 4.1% (3.7%); Roku, 3.0% (2.1%), and Tubi, 2.1% (1.7%).