Brands
Holiday movies and football lift TV viewing in December: Nielsen
MUMBAI: December proved one thing beyond doubt: nothing pulls audiences together quite like festive favourites and a bit of football. Nielsen’s December 2025 Media Distributor Gauge shows a buoyant holiday season for Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Hallmark, Netflix and Amazon, all riding a seasonal cocktail of sport, nostalgia and big-ticket originals.
Disney emerged as the month’s biggest mover, notching the highest multiplatform growth and holding firm at number two overall. Viewing rose 4 per cent, taking its total share to 10.7 per cent. ESPN did much of the heavy lifting, clocking a 30 per cent jump thanks to Monday Night Football, an expanded College Football Playoffs schedule and College Gameday. On the cosier end of the spectrum, Freeform doubled its November viewing as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman worked their annual magic.
Warner Bros. Discovery also had a December to remember. TBS and TNT posted gains of 23 per cent and 24 per cent respectively, fuelled by college football and a healthy appetite for holiday films. A Christmas Story topped the charts on TBS, while HBO Max enjoyed a 10 per cent lift, helped by the original series It: Welcome To Derry and the evergreen appeal of The Big Bang Theory and Friends.
If Christmas movies were a competitive sport, Hallmark would have taken gold. The Hallmark Channel swept the top five cable movie telecasts in December, led by She’s Making A List, Single On The 25th and A Suite Holiday Romance, cementing its place as the season’s comfort viewing champion.
Streaming hit a historic high on Christmas Day itself. According to Nielsen’s December Gauge, audiences logged a record 55.1 billion viewing minutes, making it the most-streamed day ever. NFL games on Netflix and Prime Video were the main draw, delivering platform-best monthly shares for both services.
Netflix climbed to third place overall, boosted by its NFL Christmas Day doubleheader and the runaway success of Stranger Things, now the most-streamed original series ever. The result was a 10 per cent monthly viewing increase and a record total share of 9.0 per cent. Amazon followed closely, up 12 per cent to a 4.3 per cent share, driven by Thursday Night Football, a record-breaking Christmas Day NFL game and the return of Fallout.
Two platforms marked December milestones. Amazon and The Roku Channel both posted their highest-ever monthly shares, with Roku reaching 3.0 per cent. The Roku Channel’s longer-term growth is even more striking, up 45 per cent year on year and nearly triple its share compared with December 2023.
Not everyone shared the festive bounce. Broadcast networks dipped from November levels, reflecting a quieter sports calendar with no Thanksgiving NFL games, fewer college football fixtures and no World Series. Cable news channels also saw declines over the month.
The December 2025 measurement period ran from December 1 to December 28, following Nielsen’s broadcast calendar, which tracks viewing from Monday to Sunday.
In short, December belonged to touchdowns, tinsel and tried-and-tested favourites, a reminder that when the holidays roll around, viewers still love a big game and a familiar story.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
