DVR Kings & Queens: Sports Studio Shows

TL; DR: DVR and out of home viewing make significant contributions to viewership of the daily studio shows

On Tuesday someone pinged me about the Monday, January 23 viewership for FS1’s “Undisputed” (327,000) saying “I know you don’t believe viral = viewership growth, but…”

It’s true. I don’t believe in viral events on social media being all that meaningful to TV viewership. The data backs me up. While it’s true that 327,000 is a very good number for Undisputed, the following things are also true:

1. Monday was the day after the divisional round of the NFL playoffs were completed.

2. The Dallas Cowboys were in the last game of the divisional round.

I’m still not a believer in viral events on social media being all that meaningful to TV viewership. Last year, the Dallas Cowboys weren’t even in the divisional round and the same Monday in 2022, Undisputed averaged 350,000. Of course, 2022’s Bills/Chiefs Divisional round game was tremendous. But, still, no Cowboys last year but higher viewership.

But, to be fair, I can’t rule out some Shannon Sharpe Social Shenanigans impact with Monday’s “Undisputed” ratings.

DVR & OOH impact on viewership

A decade ago, I always wondered what percentage of the viewing for the weekday studio shows was coming from DVRs, but I could never get the data. In today’s TV landscape that’s less interesting to me, but now Nielsen is also including out of home viewing and I currently have better data access (thank you) so I decided to take a look at all the ESPN & FS1 daytime studio shows for Monday, January 23.

At least on a percentage basis, DVR is still a big deal to these shows, even in 2023. Keep in mind, that some of the DVR viewing includes pausing Live TV for a little bit I’m not crystal clear on exactly where the demarcation for that is, but either way, it’s in there.

All of the ratings/viewership data you commonly see on the Internet whether it’s on Twitter or the great ShowBuzzDaily’s web site are “Live + Same Day” numbers, which is Nielsen-ese for: live viewing plus any DVR viewing up to 3AM. You never, or at least only very rarely (like below) see “live only” viewing numbers in the wild.

Data is for original airings (no encores) on Monday, January 23, 2023:

Hopefully the headings are pretty straightforward. The DVR column is the Live+Same Day viewership minus the live viewership. While I did see the Live out of home viewing vs the Live+Same Day out of home viewing, with one exception, which I’ll get to in a bit, it wasn’t really worth breaking it out into its own column, so I didn’t.

All hail Pardon the Interruption!

Even a decade ago when I couldn’t obtain the data, I never had any doubts that PTI would lead all the ESPN studio shows in DVR viewing both on a percentage and absolute basis. That was definitely the case on Monday.

But the data is pretty convincing that the same day DVR viewing is still very meaningful to all of the shows except Carton’s, which as the newest of the FS1 shows isn’t surprising…though maybe they’d be better off re-aring the previous day’s Undisputed in that time slot?

Shannon Sharpe Shenanigans?

On a percentage basis, the DVR component of Monday’s Undisputed leaps off the page, and this was the one case where the differences between the live out of home viewing and the live + same day out of home viewing were dramatic (20,000 live OOH viewers and 46,000 Live+SD OOH viewers).

While you can’t make the case that Sharpe’s behavior at Friday’s Lakers game led Undisputed to new viewership highs, wondering whether it helped the DVR viewing isn’t ridiculous.

Or maybe it was just the Cowboys losing?

I’m trying to track down some additional data (other days) for Undisputed to see if Monday was just an outlier, but a couple of things to keep in mind: it doesn’t take that many Nielsen panelists on average to make a 26,000 viewer difference (only 8 or 9). If I discover anything I’ll update this post.

Other stuff

I’m surprised by PTI’s low-ish out of home viewing contributions. I’m not that surprised on a percentage basis since it was the most-viewed of any of the shows listed, but even its absolute out of home numbers weren’t that big. I’m not sure what to make of it.