Fox Share of TV Use Spikes in October Thanks to NFL, Baseball Playoffs

The crowded sports calendar in October was a huge boon for Fox, as the company hit its highest share of TV use in a year.

With NFL and college football games, Major League Baseball’s playoffs and the first two games of the World Series on its properties, Fox claimed 8.4 percent of all TV usage in October, according to Nielsen‘s monthly Media Distributor Gauge. That’s the highest mark for the company in the 12 months Nielsen has compiled TV use data by distributor and up from 7.3 percent in September.

Viewing of the Fox broadcast network rose by 16 percent in the October period (which ran from Sept. 30-Oct. 27), and Fox News was up 12 percent in the lead-up to the presidential election. FS1 more than tripled its viewing (albeit from a much smaller starting point than its corporate siblings) thanks in large part to having several National League Championship Series games.

Disney held onto the No. 1 ranking among distributors with 11.7 percent of all TV usage, up from 11.3 percent the previous month. ABC improved by 8 percent with a consistent diet of live sports, primetime shows airing new episodes and World News Tonight, which is the most watched evening newscast on TV. YouTube (10.6 percent) and NBCUniversal (9.2 percent) were fairly steady in second and third place, and Paramount (8.7 percent) was fourth, a little ahead of Fox. The 14 media companies in Nielsen’s rankings made up about three-fourths of all TV use for the month.

Nielsen’s TV distributor rankings for October are below.