By David Bauder, Media Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --Instead of watching their own finances crater, shut-in television viewers tuned in to the game show "Let's Make a Deal" in record numbers last week.
TV programs across the dial recorded superlatives last week with a captive audience of millions of Americans told to stay home because of the coronavirus. Few were as interesting as the newfound fervor for CBS' "Let's Make a Deal," which recorded its most-watched week since the show was brought back 11 years ago with Wayne Brady as host, the Nielsen company said.
Cost-conscious viewers also gave "The Price is Right," now hosted by Drew Carey, its biggest audience in four years, Nielsen said.
It was also a terrific week for television uber-producer Dick Wolf, whose Windy City-based trilogy of dramas dominates NBC's lineup. Excluding special crossover episodes, "Chicago Fire" recorded its most popular episode in six years, while "Chicago Med" and "Chicago PD" had their largest audiences in four years, Nielsen said.
The Wolf-produced dramas "FBI" and "FBI: Most Wanted" on CBS did have a crossover last week, leading both relatively new shows to their highest ratings ever.
Nielsen hasn't computed the numbers for last week yet, but during the previous week, television usage overall was up 18 percent over the same week a year ago. It was up 43 percent among viewers aged 12 to 17, which leads to questions about how much home schooling was being accomplished.
Increased usage was even more striking in Nielsen's measurements of streaming. During the week of March 16, Nielsen said that U.S. consumers streamed 156.1 billion minutes of content. That was more than double the 71.3 billion minutes streamed during the same week a year earlier, and up from the 116.4 billion minutes for the week of March 2 this year.
Twenty-nine percent of the streaming two weeks ago was Netflix programming, and 20% was YouTube, Nielsen said.
CBS was the most popular network in primetime, averaging 6.3 million viewers and led by the best ratings for "NCIS" this year. NBC had 4.72 million viewers in prime time, ABC had 4.66 million, Fox had 3.4 million, Univision had 1.7 million, ION Television had 1.3 million, Telemundo had 1.2 million and the CW had 600,000 viewers.
News dominated the cable world again, with Fox News Channel averaging 4.23 million viewers in primetime. MSNBC had 2.32 million viewers, CNN had 2.19 million, HGTV had 1.26 million and TLC had 1.13 million.
ABC's "World News Tonight" led the evening newscasts with an average of 11.9 million viewers. NBC's "Nightly News" had 11 million viewers and the "CBS Evening News" had 7.4 million.
The week's top 20 shows in primetime, their networks and viewers:
1. "NCIS," CBS, 13.2 million.
2. "FBI," CBS, 10.69 million.
3. "60 Minutes," CBS, 10.51 million.
4. "Chicago Med," NBC, 9.61 million.
5. "The Voice," NBC, 9.58 million.
6. "FBI: Most Wanted," CBS, 9.5 million.
7. "Chicago Fire," NBC, 9.21 millioin.
8. "Hawaii Five-0," CBS, 8.44 million.
9. "Survivor," CBS, 8.2 million.
10. "The Masked Singer," Fox, 8.03 million.
11. "This is Us," NBC, 7.98 million.
12. "Chicago PD," NBC, 7.76 million.
13. "American Idol (Sunday)," ABC, 7.32 million.
14. "911," Fox, 7.04 million.
15. "American Idol" (Monday), ABC, 7.02 million.
16. "NCIS: Los Angeles," CBS, 7.01 million.
17. "Station 19," ABC, 6.89 million.
18. "The Good Doctor," ABC, 6.82 million.
19. "MacGyver," CBS, 6.72 million.
20. "America's Funniest Home Videos," ABC, 6.54 million.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More