We’re a year into the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. and it should come as no surprise that social video consumption has seen drastic, sustained growth, with many people still homebound and in front of their computers and smartphones more and more. 

Social video analytics company Tubular Labs examined how much year-over-year growth occurred in February across five genres: sports, gaming, entertainment, kids entertainment and news/politics. (A note about methodology: The data in this article is based on a U.S.-viewing audience, including YouTube and Facebook. The minutes watched data is based on views of at least 30 seconds.) 

The gaming genre was the clear winner, with 80.1 billion minutes watched in February 2021, an impressive 73% increase from February 2020. Kids entertainment (55.3 billion minutes watched, a 34% increase year-over-year) took second place, followed by entertainment (77 billion minutes, a 22% increase from February 2020), news and politics (17.2 billion, +17%) and sports (14.5 billion, +15%). 

Also Read: Social Video 2020 Year in Review: The Broadcast and Digital Winners

One of the most-watched gaming properties for U.S. audiences over the last year has been Riot Games, which led for minutes watched for 10 out of 12 months compared to other top properties Nintendo, Activision Blizzard and PokerStars. (In December and February, Nintendo was tops for minutes watched.) October was Riot’s biggest month for watch-time, with 114 million minutes watched. 

The top Riot-owned video by views in the last year was posted to the League of Legends YouTube channel in October: “K/DA - MORE ft. Madison Beer, (G)I-DLE, Lexie Liu, Jaira Burns, Seraphine (Official Music Video),” with 80.8 million views.

Looking at unique U.S. viewers in the last year, Activision Blizzard and Nintendo have taken turns as No. 1 over the last 12 months. April was Activision Blizzard’s top month for unique viewers (8.9 million) — right when initial stay-at-home orders were in full effect across the country. But Nintendo has lately taken over for the most unique viewers, with 6.9 million in December, 7.6 million in January and 8.5 million in February.  

Activision Blizzard’s top YouTube video in the last year was a Spanish-language version of the Crash Bandicoot 4 trailer, with 18.8 million views; the English version was close behind with 16.6 million. Nintendo’s most-watched video in the last year was posted this January and already has 10.2 million views: “A Bigger Badder Bowser - Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury - Nintendo Switch.”

New York – Major League Baseball Business and Media president Bob Bowman said the media industry still hasn’t quite put its finger on the true viewing habits of millennials, but he does know one thing: whatever is offered to them better be on mobile.

“They’re spending a lot of time on their screens, but I don’t think we know how they are going to buy and watch content,” Bowman said at a panel session at the Paley Center for Media’s Media’s 2015 Paley International Council Summit here Friday.  “All we know is that if it’s not on a mobile device it’s not going to matter and that pricing matters. Beyond price and mobile, we haven’t learned a lot.”

Sports programming has been one of the few linear television successes because of its immediate nature – “No one watches the Super Bowl on Monday,” said Turner Broadcasting System president David Levey. And while its status as “appointment TV” has helped it with advertisers, Turner is branching out into a new area – eSports – that it hopes will capture both a digital and traditional TV audience.

Twitch founder and CEO Emmett Shear said E-Sports is garnering a huge following among millennials – about 2 million viewers watched the League of Legends championship series, a role playing video game,  on the service recently. While Shear said mobile viewing is less with gamers, it is starting to gain some momentum, with about 25% of its viewership via mobile devices.

“Nobody wants to watch the world’s best Candy Crush player yet,” Shear said.

Turner recently bought into eSports business, announcing in September that it will launch a new Counter Strike: Global Offensive league in partnership with WME/IMG that will air weekly on TBS.  

Levy said the strategy is to stage two 10-week long seasons in 2016, with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday matches provided digitally and Friday finals matches on TBS.

While mobility is the future, Bowman said that doesn’t mean the traditional TV model is disappearing, it’s just evolving. And while sports has been a costly programming item for networks he added that he believes affiliate fees will remain stable and even grow.

“I don’t think fees are going to fall,” Bowman said. “I do think people like David [Levy] are going to ask for different rights. What’s going to happen, even in mid-deal, is that they will pay us as much or more but ask for more rights. How they deliver that content is what’s going to broaden for people like David.”

And though programmers have complained for years about the high cost of sports, Levy said he doesn’t see those charges declining in the near future.

“It’s a supply and demand marketplace,” Levy said. “There are people that want stuff and there are people that need stuff. New networks like Fox Sports [1], they’re going to need a lot of product and companies like ours want a lot of product.”

But he added that if pay TV subscribers continue to decline, there is going to need to be some correction to offset lost revenue, but didn’t elaborate.