GECs rule, but cricket plays spoilsport

Indians love general entertainment channels or GECs. That mix of soap operas, reality, song and dance and films has always commanded more than half of all TV viewing. And in the age of online video, surprisingly enough, it has remained rock steady.

Going by data provided by Broadcast Audience Research Council, the industry funded ratings body, the share of general entertainment channels (GECs) remains a massive 56 per cent of total viewership over data crunched for the last three months. Of this, half comes from Hindi and the rest from Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and other languages.

The only thing that seems to seriously impact GEC viewership is sports and news. When breaking news or India cricket matches are aired, viewership of Hindi GECs, the only ones BARC shared data on, dips. This is the first of three big things data crunched by BARC for Business Standard show.

As BARC completes a year, we decided to look at what it shows of the Indian TV universe. Funnily enough, the picture of Indian viewing habits remains what TAM data showed, albeit with a bigger more spread out sample that now includes rural India.

"Currently, 22,000 homes are seeded with BAR-O-Meters. In the second year of operation, we will expand our panel homes by 10,000 as mandated by government guidelines," says BARC Chief Executive Officer Partho Dasgupta. About 30 per cent of the homes BARC covers are in rural India.

According to its data, India has 153.3 million TV homes - 77.5 million urban and 76 million rural. The data also show the huge share both Tamil and Telugu enjoy. They form eight per cent each of all GEC viewing at an all India level, pushing them ahead of kids or news genres. It reiterates how big the non-Hindi pie in India is and why broadcasters such as STAR and Viacom18 have spent hundreds of crores to acquire regional channels.

The third interesting fact the data show is the share of film channels in overall TV viewing. The TAM data hovered between 14-16 per cent. BARC data for the past three months show it at a massive 20 per cent. The reasons remain unclear.

The hypothesis that this be a result of the inclusion of rural India, which is said to be a big watcher of films, cannot be tested because TAM data did not cover rural India. Sports channels, too, show an increase from about 2.5 per cent to four per cent.

However, it is probably safe to surmise that increased investment in sports - from Sony and Star in particular - is pushing up overall viewership. BARC measures viewership as a percentage of impressions, which is the total of the target group that saw a particular programme, commercial or slot at a particular time. It is a time weighted average of the number of people watching TV and the time spent by them.