TV-owning households in India grew 6.9% to 210 mln in two years: BARC

Television-viewing homes in the country increased 6.9 per cent to 210 million at the end of 2020 compared to two years ago, the Broadcast Audience Rating Council (BARC) said on Thursday.

At the end of 2018, there were over 197 million TV-viewing households.

The TV-viewing individuals also witnessed an increase of 6.7 per cent, reaching 892 million from 836 million in the same period.

India has a population of 1.3 billion people and 300 million households, the agency said. It can be noted that as people were forced to stay indoors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, TV viewing increased.

"With an additional 13 million TV households and an opportunity for another 90 million households that are yet to own a TV set, India's broadcast ecosystem continues to have a significant potential for growth in the years to come," the agency's Chief Executive Sunil Lulla said.

Its chief of measurement science and business analytics, Derrick Gray, claimed the estimates are robust and have been arrived at with the help of data and findings based from various previously validated field studies.

'TV UE 2020' has been developed by computing the linear growth of TV households and TV individuals from Broadcast India (BI) studies conducted in 2016 and 2018 at geographic and demographic levels, BARC said in a statement.

The distribution of the TV population by NCCS (New Consumer Classification System) was taken from the most recent Indian Readership Survey (IRS), it added.

The agency said as the Indian population continues to move up the socio-economic pyramid, changes are also observed in the NCCS profile of TV households.

TV households in urban markets grew by 4 per cent from 87.8 million in 2018 to 91 million while rural markets have grown by 9 per cent to 119.2 million in 2020.