With its presentations of the 4 Nations Face-Off Championship, various prime time NBA games and compelling studio programming, ESPN attained its most-watched February in seven years. According to data from Nielsen Media Research, which defines the month of February as consisting from Jan. 27 to Feb. 23, the network garnered an average of 575,000 viewers per minute, which is up 21% from the previous year. Furthermore, fans watched more minutes of ESPN programming and sports content on ABC this past month than any other February since 2015 across the two networks.
ESPN collected a 30% share of sports viewership across all networks during the month, which is up from the 27% finish it had last year. Aside from FOX, which was the television home of Super Bowl LIX, no other competing networks were measured to have a double-digit share. The 4 Nations Face-Off averaged 4.3 million viewers on ESPN platforms during the month, indicative of a 1079% rise from the World Cup of Hockey nine years prior. On top of that, the championship game between the United States and Canada averaged 9.3 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest hockey audience in ESPN history.
The month concluded with an NBA tripleheader featuring games that all averaged more than 2.2 million viewers, according to a report by Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch. The games featured major-market teams such as the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, all of whom are currently in playoff position. ABC averaged 2.9 million viewers for its broadcast of the game between the Dallas Mavericks and Golden State Warriors, marking the 10th-largest audience of the NBA season.
The strong February performance comes after ESPN amassed its most-watched month since 2015 with a record-setting January containing an average minute audience of 1.6 million viewers. During the month of January, Nielsen-rated ESPN networks were responsible for 42% of all sports viewership in the month, with the singular ESPN network accounting for 29% of viewership in this category individually.
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