EXCLUSIVE: NBCUniversal has been bringing the heat across broadcast and streaming this summer thanks to the company’s unscripted heavyweights Love Island USA and America’s Got Talent.
Love Island USA‘s successful Season 7 has already made headlines throughout the summer, but now Deadline can exclusively reveal that the series raked in 1.9B minutes viewed on Peacock the week of the finale to become the top streaming title of the week.
The series was No. 1 among streaming reality series for eight consecutive weeks this summer as Season 7 dominated online conversation. While Nielsen doesn’t differentiate between seasons in its measurement, the company has previously indicated that most of the viewing this summer was for Season 7.
On broadcast, America’s Got Talent has been the top entertainment series of the summer in terms of total viewers, averaging 5.9M per episode after seven days, according to data from Nielsen.
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The long-running competition program is now poised to secure its 20th consecutive year as the No. 1 broadcast summer alternative series among total viewers.
Interestingly, both series also drive significant co-viewing — albeit completely different types. For Love Island USA, 38% of viewership is co-viewing, with a higher concentration of co-viewing among young adults and adults in non-married households. By contract, 48% of AGT viewing is co-viewing, but it skews toward adults with kids and adults in married households.
Given their subject matters, this tracks for both series. But, it also illustrates a notable diversity in content coming from NBCUniversal that has allowed the company to capture a very wide range of consumers — which is becoming increasingly hard to do as the content landscape becomes more fractured and viewers, especially younger ones, have their attention diverted elsewhere.
Love Island USA and America’s Got Talent target incredibly different audiences, which puts NBCUniversal at quite an advantage to appeal to the largest total viewership possible. Over 50% of the Love Island USA Season 7 audience was under 30, while only 6% of the AGT audience falls in that demo.
Even more exemplary of the diverse audiences that the company is attracting with its unscripted series is the fact that only 2% of viewers have sampled (which means they’ve watched at least six minutes of an episode) the current seasons of both Love Island USA and America’s Got Talent.
While Love Island USA has wrapped its summer run, NBCU is hoping the show’s increasing popularity will translate to success for its new spinoff Beyond the Villa, which is currently following the exploits of the Season 6 cast as they move to Los Angeles post-villa. America’s Got Talent, on the other hand, is ongoing as Season 20 heads toward live shows.