Oscars audience drops, viewing figures show

The 98th Academy Awards ceremony has delivered another sobering signal about the state of traditional broadcast entertainment in the United States, with live viewership declining 9 percent year-on-year to 17.9 million viewers. This latest contraction underscores a structural challenge facing European investors with exposure to American media assets: the inexorable shift away from appointment television toward fragmented, on-demand consumption patterns. The decline is particularly noteworthy given that the Oscars had been showing signs of stabilisation in recent years. After bottoming out at 10.4 million viewers in 2021—a pandemic-era nadir that shocked the industry—the ceremony appeared to be on a recovery trajectory. This year's reversal suggests that recovery was illusory, masking deeper secular trends that continue to erode the economics of live broadcast events. What's instructive for European investors is that the event still commanded a substantial audience of 17.9 million across Disney's traditional broadcast network ABC and its Hulu streaming platform. However, the figure represents a fraction of the 40 million-viewer audiences the Oscars routinely commanded in previous decades. This bifurcation—split viewership across legacy broadcast and newer streaming infrastructure—reflects the broader challenge facing legacy media companies globally, including major European broadcasters with transatlantic exposure. The programming choices at this year's