Report: NBC Lost 7% of Its Primetime Viewers But Still Led Linear

As media conglomerates led by Warner Bros. Discovery conduct terrorized, ashen-faced retreats from the free-flowing red ink of the Streaming Wars, they should keep this in mind: Linear will provide them no safe quarterly shelter. 

The latest distillation of 2021-22 primetime average audiences by major broadcast and cable networks, assembled by Nielsen and blasted out to social Wednesday night by LightShed Partners, lays it pretty bare. 

NBC, which saw its average primetime audience decline by a whopping 7% year over year, won the 2021-22 TV season averaging 5.148 million viewers in primetime, narrowly surpassing CBS, which lost 8% of its watchers and averaged 5.144 million souls. 

Fox finished fourth among the Big Four broadcast webs losing 14% of its audience -- no doubt in part because it lost NFL "Thursday Night Football" to Amazon. 

ESPN, until now, the lynchpin of the pay TV ecosystem, lost 14% of its primetime viewers. 

Nielsen Figures

And as LightShed's Rich Greenfield pointed out, TNT lost 12% of its average primetime audience, affirming WBD's stated reluctance to charge into an NBA licensing renewal. 

Oh, and Fox News was essentially the only major linear network that managed to come close to flat year over year.