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The new year meant that AEW Dynamite and Collision began simulcasting on Max as well as their home cable networks, TBS and TNT. It’s important for AEW to widen its distribution, making the weekly programs accessible to millions of additional homes.
However, the data from the first episodes suggests the impact on traditional TV viewership has been minimal. Ratings for Dynamite and Collision—we have three episodes total so far—remain consistent with previous trends.
Viewership for Dynamite on TBS in the first two episodes since the simulcast began has remained stable, with 588,000 and 615,000 viewers, averaging 602,000. This is nearly identical to the December average of 595,000. The P18-49 demographic shows a similar trend, with the first two episodes averaging 221,000 viewers (0.16 rating) compared to the December average of 239,000 (0.18), indicating a slight if significant change.
For Collision on TNT, the January 4 episode, the only one aired since the simulcast started, delivered 345,000 viewers. Excluding the December 21 episode, which benefited from a massive College Football Playoff lead-in, the other two December episodes averaged 262,000 viewers. This suggests viewership for Collision may have slightly increased with the simulcast. Notably, the January 4 episode performed almost identically to November’s average of 346,000 viewers.
Maybe future months will provide clearer insights into how this impacts viewership across platforms.
There have been no announcements nor have heard what viewership is like on Max. The absence of such messaging might indicate that the early results have not yet demonstrated a transformative impact on total viewership numbers.
The move simulcast on streaming matters as pay TV continues to lose its coverage—now in just 51% of U.S. households, according to a recent MoffettNathanson analysis. Max is in about 50 million U.S. homes. (It’s hard to decipher exactly because Warner Bros. Discovery’s reporting lumps Max in with Discovery+ subscribers.) Some but certainly not all Max subscribers are non-cable homes. Many of those subscribers get the service as part of their traditional HBO premium add-on to their cable bill. Max is in the lower end of the top 10 streaming services in terms of actual usage on televisions, according to Nielsen’s “The Gauge”.