Programming

CBS’s Young Sheldon and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy led Thursday’s non-NFL fare in the demo, while NBC’s SVU dipped to season lows. Fox’s Thursday Night Football coverage, with 8.1 million total viewers and a 2.1 demo rating, was up from last week’s fast nationals.

Heading toward a near midnight Sunday deadline, IATSE members now have their ballots to vote on a new three-year deal with producers. The nearly 60,000 members of the below-the-line union received emails this morning starting around 6 a.m. PT prompting them to login in and digitally cast their vote.

Disney and Netflix are very different companies, with very different investor bases, but they’re head-to-head competitors in the streaming wars. And on Friday, Netflix’s market valuation climbed above Disney’s for the first time in about a year — ironically, coming on “Disney Plus Day,” the Mouse House’s company-wide marketing event designed to punch up excitement and subscriber signups for the streamer.

The WarnerMedia-owned streamer will debut And Just Like That with two episodes on Dec. 9, picking up 11-plus years after the last time Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Co. were on screens in the second SATC feature film. The remaining eight episodes will roll out weekly.

After years of complaints, NBCUniversal and its peers are looking for other ways to count viewers, with or without the ratings giant. Next Tuesday, NBCUniversal plans to host a forum to discuss alternative ways to measure its audience. Representatives of major advertising agencies, industry trade groups and companies including Ford Motor, L’Oreal and Pfizer are expected to attend. NBCUniversal is also sifting through proposals from 80 measurement companies, Nielsen among them, to create new methods for quantifying viewers.

Evoca, a live TV service that delivers channels via ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology, says that Sinclair has refused to negotiate on carriage for its Bally Sports regional networks. For about the past year it has been trying to get Bally Sports Arizona so the Phoenix homes that watch over-the-air broadcast TV can watch their local professional sports teams. Bally Sports Arizona carries live games from the Phoenix Suns, the Arizona Mercury, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Arizona Coyotes.

TVNewsCheck‘s Michael Depp talks with new syndie talk show host Nick Cannon, along with WTTG Washington Good Day D.C. anchors Jeannette Reyes and Wisdom Martin, about Cannon’s whistle-stop tour to co-host Fox Owned Stations’ morning shows across the country promoting the show, including stops in New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco thus far.

When Big Bird tweeted he had been vaccinated against COVID-19, conservative politicians immediately pushed back, including Ted Cruz who grilled Big Bird for what he called “government propaganda.”

ABC’s broadcast of the 55th Country Music Association Awards veritably matched last year’s audience low (with 6.6 million total viewers, per prelim numbers) and its demo rating (with a 1.1). The kudoscast thus led Wednesday in both measures.

CBS touts its strength in the metric most associated with streamers, so The Hollywood Reporter decided to check the network’s claims.

CBS is touting its viewership for the 2021-22 broadcast season, claiming that its viewers have consumed more that 166 million minutes of CBS programming, more than any other broadcast network. Of the aggregated number, primetime viewing accounts for over 59 billion minutes, CBS says.

Medical drama Good Sam and a new season of Celebrity Big Brother will join a largely stable schedule.

NBC’s The Voice this Tuesday drew 6.7 million total viewers and a 0.8 demo rating, up sharply from last week’s clip show and leading the night in the demo. Over on CBS, FBI (7M/0.7) drew the night’s largest audience and was up in the demo.

Television became a lifeline for American households during the pandemic, but a new report from Mohu suggests the financial investment in TV services has hit a tipping point.

Kids and family programming deals are surging as streaming companies look to double down on content that serves a highly-engaged cohort of younger users. Children’s content used to be perceived as a tool to stop users from canceling streaming accounts. Now it’s a key driver for new user growth.

Behind a Thursday night NFL game and the Atlanta Braves’ World Series-clinching win, the Fox broadcast network won the week in primetime. Fox averaged 6.9 million viewers, with NBC at 5.2 million, CBS at 4.9 million, ABC at 2.8 million, Univision at 1.3 million, Ion Television at 890,000 and Telemundo at 820,000. On cable in October, Fox’s The Five eclipsed every show on cable news in popularity for the first time ever, Nielsen said. That’s highly unusual for a program that airs at 5 p.m. Eastern and in the midafternoon on the West Coast.

Nielsen has begun internal tests of its new multimedia audience measurement methodology, Nielsen One, and will begin testing it with clients next year, the company’s top management executives said during a briefing with a Wall Street securities firm. “Most of the methodology is built from Big Data sources like [connected TV] makers and Roku, but Nielsen’s panel remains vital to calibrating the data for fraudulent accounts, non-viewed content (e.g., streaming or set-top box showing video, but TV is off) and better accounting for underrepresented audiences,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Daniel Salmon disclosed in a report sent to investors.

It’s the only top talker to post gains in the session ending Oct. 31 and has grown 150% over the past 13 weeks in this its final season.