On the strength of live sports and holiday programming fare, ESPN and Hallmark closed out the final week of 2017 as the most watched cable networks in primetime, according to Nielsen.
ESPN was the most watched network for the holiday week of Dec. 25 to Dec. 31 with 6.4 million viewers, followed by Hallmark Channel, which averaged 2.2 million viewers on the appeal of its Holiday-themed original movies slate.
Fox News was third with 1.5 million viewers, followed by USA Network (1.4 million viewers) and TNT (1.3 million), according to Nielsen.
ESPN and Hallmark also finished first and second respectively, on a 24-hour basis, followed by Fox News, Nickelodeon and Discovery Channel.
Fox News was topped all cable news networks for the week, followed by MSNBC (1 million viewers) and CNN (732,000 viewers,) according to Nielsen.
