The consumption during the week was at 1.22 trillion minutes, still 38% higher than pre-Covid19 time (January 11-31). Last week, the total TV consumption had reached a historic high of 1.27 trillion minutes.
However, despite a rise in viewership, the lockdown and supply chain issues have resulted in a 26% drop in overall free commercial time (FCT) from 28 million seconds in a week in January to 20 million seconds in week 14.
The news genre, which has seen highest growth, has recorded just 1% drop in FCT, whereas general entertainment channels (GECs), movies, music and kids genres have also witnessed a de-growth of 34%, 43%, 58% and 43%, respectively in weekly average FCTs.
In terms of languages across general entertainment genres, only English Entertainment channels have recorded a 19% jump, whereas all other languages have registered drop, including Hindi GECs (31%), Tamil GEC (52%), Bangla (47%), Kannada (37%), Malayalam (42%), Telugu (35%) and Marathi (29%).
Among movie genres, English movie genre was least impacted with just 1% drop in FCT, while Hindi dropped by 49%, Tamil by 57%, Telugu by 39%, Kannada by 46% and Bengali by 36%.
Viewership stabilised
The viewership data suggests that average daily reach has stabilised at 627 million, compared to 560 million in the pre-Covid19 weeks, while number of viewers watching TV all seven days a week has also plateaued at 47%, which is 15% higher than pre-Covid19 period.
Interestingly, the drop in the week 14 has come mainly on the back of decrease of 7% in the Southern markets. In the Hindi speaking markets (HSM), the drop is just 1%.
In Week 14 also, news and movies continued to drive the overall 38% increase over January viewership. While news genre was up 219%, movies overall witnessed a 73% rise.
The biggest highlight of the week was an all-time high viewership of 4 billion impressions by the Hindi general entertainment genre in the HSM urban region. This is the highest since 2015 that the genre has recorded, mainly on the back of ‘Ramayan’ on DD National and ‘Mahabharat’ on DD Bharati, which has now entered in the top 5 GEC list for the first time ever.
BARC defines impressions as the number of individuals of a target audience, averaged across minutes. Reach is the total number of individuals who viewed the event for at least one minute.
