Disney Slips Significantly Year-to-Year in Original Content and Streaming Viewership Market Share

Less Americans are watching content made by Disney, and that may just signal a huge problem for the House of Mouse.

Disney’s share of total U.S. TV viewing has slipped over the past year in Nielsen’s “Media Distributor Gauge,” and the details of what did drive Disney’s viewing make the bigger story pretty clear: Disney is leaning harder on sports and seasonal library programming, while the industry’s biggest “originals” gravity is increasingly pulling elsewhere.

Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge (an expansion of The Gauge that rolls up broadcast, cable, and streaming viewing into total “TV usage” by distributor) is designed to show where audiences spend time across the full TV screen ecosystem, not just streaming subscriptions or social buzz. That makes it a useful “share of attention” scoreboard for who is winning minutes, month after month.

Disney’s empire made gains but YouTube leads in overall TV use in December, Nielsen’s latest Media Distributor Gauge shows. Full chart: https://t.co/NkSnwZGxOX pic.twitter.com/O5avnwDyX3

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 27, 2026

The year-over-year share move: Disney down, not up!

In the December 2024 Media Distributor Gauge, Disney ranked No. 1 with 11.2% of total TV usage. One year later in the December 2025 Media Distributor Gauge, Disney was No. 2 at 10.7%. That’s a 0.5 share-point decline year over year in one of the most content-heavy, TV-heavy months on the calendar. It’s also at a point where Disney is buffeted by heavy sports schedules that benefit ESPN and ABC Sports coverage, automatically placing easy watch time into Disney’s bracket. So if sports viewership was up for December (and it was), traditionally Disney content may be receiving less eyes than even appears.

Note: Nielsen also notes the December measurement windows follow the broadcast calendar (late-November through late-December), which matters because these intervals are where big holiday libraries and sports rights can overwhelm “new originals” on sheer minutes.

What Disney’s viewing growth is actually coming from:

The December 2025 report is explicit about why Disney improved month to month (November to December): it was “fueled by ESPN” with major football lifts, and reinforced by Freeform’s holiday movie programming. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the business model. Live sports and evergreen seasonal libraries are reliable minutes factories.

But it also frames the core issue in your prompt: if Disney’s share is softening year over year even with sports and holiday strength doing the heavy lifting, then “original produced content” is not the incremental engine expanding Disney’s share of TV attention right now.

Nielsen’s 2025 ARTEY Awards, which are based on Streaming Content Ratings minutes viewed, underline the same dynamic from another angle. The top overall streaming title of 2025 was “Bluey” on Disney+ (and it won “Top Acquired”), while the Top Original of the year was “Stranger Things” on Netflix.

Bandit and Bingo run around and have fun with Turtleboy – Disney Plus

That’s a blunt tell. Disney absolutely has tentpole originals, but the biggest consistent driver of Disney+ streaming minutes (as recognized by Nielsen’s year-end streaming superlatives) is an acquired library title, while Netflix is capturing the signature “original” crown with a global mega-franchise.

Making all of this even worse for Disney, not only was Bluey a big hit that still couldn’t lead them to the promised land, but also King of the Hill’s reboot has apparently been a streaming sensation — yet even it cannot lift whatever is dragging the rest of Disney down as viewers tune out.

If you define “original produced content” the way most of the industry does, meaning new, exclusive series that viewers can’t get elsewhere, then Disney’s year-over-year distributor share dip suggests three things are happening simultaneously:

1. Disney’s total minutes are increasingly rights- and library-led (ESPN events, holiday marathons), which are powerful but don’t necessarily expand share in the same way breakout originals can.

2. Competitors are capturing the cultural and minutes-based upside of flagship originals (as illustrated by Nielsen’s top-original recognition going to Netflix).

3. The overall TV ecosystem is more streaming-dominant than ever, so “originals that travel” matter more in the share war; a slight slip in a peak month is a warning sign that Disney’s original pipeline is not translating into incremental share at the same rate as the leaders.

Nielsen’s Gauge data doesn’t claim “Disney originals are failing.” What it does show is that Disney’s overall share of TV attention is drifting down year over year (at least in the clean December-to-December comparison), and the cited drivers of Disney’s strength are sports and seasonal programming, while the year’s defining “top original” minutes crown sits elsewhere.

Los números de octubre del visionado de televisión por plataforma en USA según la medición de Nielsen, donde el streaming alcanzó una cuota del 45,7 % del consumo total de TV.https://t.co/IbJsKBbEx1

— Jorge Vitali (@jorvitali) December 9, 2025

Worse for Disney though, when their Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN apps are added together for streaming market share, they’re currently only at 4.8%. If they were broken apart into their three services separately, it’s now likely that Roku and Tubi are performing better than Disney’s flagship service by itself. And frankly, that’s something Disney executives would probably really, really like for you to not know.