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I was on track to get today’s jam-packed double issue of the Streaming Ratings Report out right on time…and then I got a call to appear on The Town after news broke that Jen Salke “is exiting” Prime Video. Since I still wanted to give you something to read this weekend, I pulled out one of the mini-dives for the Streaming Ratings Report to let it stand on its own.
So let’s talk awards shows!
Specifically, Disney put The Oscars on Hulu for the first time this year, Netflix has been streaming the Screen Actors Guild Awards for the last two years, and the Critic’s Choice Awards have been on YouTube for the last two years. (All three streamed in the last month or so.) Not to mention Amazon streams the Academy of Country Music Awards, and both the Grammys and Golden Globes were dual-cast on streaming and linear TV this year, though I couldn’t find the streaming ratings for either the Grammys or the Golden Globes, both of which were on CBS.
In short, awards shows have increasingly gone digital. But has it worked?
Awards Shows Are Struggling on Streaming
The 31st Screen Actors Guild on Netflix
Let’s start with streaming’s big dog, Netflix. In 2023, Netflix grabbed the rights to the Screen Actors Guild Awards, streaming them on YouTube that year, and then on Netflix in 2024 and this year in 2025. Alas, this year’s show led to this headline:
In this case, yeah, I think that headline captures what the data says. It is safe to say that Netflix will not be saving awards ceremonies.
To start, we don’t have viewership figures for this year’s ceremony, since Nielsen didn’t provide me the numbers for this year’s ceremony yet. Looking at global data, all we can say for sure is that the ceremony didn’t grab over 2.8 million “views” globally the week it came out according to Netflix’s global top ten lists.
The SAG awards also missed the top ten last year, but when Netflix’s global data drop came out, it revealed that the 2024 show only grabbed 1.8 million views (globally). But Nielsen gave me America’s viewership, and it only had 2.8 million hours in total for the two hour-ish show.
For context, the last year the show aired on TV—on TNT and TBS—it averaged 1.8 million viewers per minute. In just the US. When the show streamed on YouTube, it had 1.4 million “views”, but a YouTube view means much, much less than a Netflix view.
At its peak, 5.2 million viewers watched the ceremony in 2013. In other words, the push to streaming hasn’t reversed its viewership decline and it may be getting worse.
The 40th Annual Film Independent Spirit Awards on YouTube
The 40th Annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, aka The Spirit Awards, streamed on YouTube a month ago. The day after, the show only had 56K+ views; a month later, it’s sitting at just 98,200 views, which is obviously very, very low for an awards ceremony. And this isn’t even accounting for how I feel about YouTube views, which can be easily gamed, are global, not US-only numbers, and are poorly defined.
The Academy of Country Music Awards on Prime Video
When Prime Video and the ACM re-upped their deal in 2023, they released this datecdote that the show “garnered more than 7.7 million viewers on Prime Video”. But Amazon didn’t put out a time frame and “viewers” is undefined, unlike “views”—used by Disney and Netflix—which has a precise measurement.
Meanwhile, this year, we’re still waiting on last year’s Academy of Country Music Awards ratings on Prime Video. Remember my rule of thumb: if a streamer doesn’t announce something, they’re not hiding good news. So the fact that we didn’t get a similar number for last year’s show speaks volumes.
Compare that vague datecdote (What defines a view? What’s the time frame? Is that America or global?) to the 16 million average viewers the ACM awards netted in 2015. Or the Country Music Television Awards performance in 2024, which averaged 5.4 million this year on CBS, about the same as the year before. (Reminder: CBS replaced the ACMs with the CMTs.) Or the Country Music Awards on ABC, which averaged 6.0 million, down from 6.8 million the year before. Also, all those numbers are US-only figures, not global.
But we haven’t covered the biggest awards show of them all yet…
Streaming Didn’t Help The Oscar Numbers
On the one hand, my model using the popularity of the Best Picture films to predict Oscar ratings remains undefeated.
With the same number of popular films as the year before, the ratings were basically flat, up 1% to 19.7, a five-year high. Samba TV had similar data, with 13.1 million households watching, up from 2021 but down compared to the last two years.
But don’t expect me to take a victory lap, because I thought this year’s ratings would go up since the ceremony was dual-cast on ABC and Hulu. (I sent in a prediction to Matt Belloni predicting an increase of 3-4 million.)
Alas, the ratings didn’t go up. They stayed the same.
It’s tough to pin down any one factor to explain this. Perhaps it was the films. Outside of Wicked, no cultural phenomenons got nominated this year, unlike Barbenheimer the year before. Plus, unlike Barbenheimer, neither Wicked nor Dune: Part Two were really contending to win it all. If I had to pick one factor I didn’t account for, that’s it. Related, I still hate the early start time.
The Oscars also need to nominate more popular films, as I’ve been arguing for years now.
Then again, maybe the transition to streaming will take a few years, for both Disney (the streaming-cast suffered technical glitches) and younger audiences; as THR wrote up, this year’s telecast saw some gains among younger viewers.
What Do These Streaming Numbers Mean for Live Events Like Awards Shows?
Basically, it means that, as a medium, streaming has a tougher time driving eyeballs to big, one-off events compared to linear TV. This makes sense: one medium is (was?) all about live and linear; the other is about on-demand and delayed. Sports have struggled with this too. Not to mention, a lot of the design of streaming services only thought of TV shows and films, not live sports, news and events.
