KBC moves up in RATe race

MUMBAI: Star India's programming weapon Kaun Banega Crorepati ( KBC) in its second week has moved up in the ratings. While in its debut week, KBC's ratings slipped day on day, the second week has seen ratings stabilise between the 8 — 10 television ratings (TVR) range.

Most advertisers ET spoke to also seemed satisfied with the show's performance, and said that one would have to wait and watch to see if the show performs from now. Star would be safe if the show now managed to sustain its ratings going forward. Paritosh Joshi, president, advertising sales and distribution, was gungho about the show's performance.

"The strong upward momentum that the show has established is reflected in its rating performance. We have been vindicated and the Cassandras who wrote off the show after the 1st weeks ratings must acknowledge that they called wrong.

We believe they will continue upwards for a while as adoption grows and will have a number of higher jumps when we do specials. They will in any case stabilise at levels no lower than what we have seen in week 2," he said.

The second week ratings published by TAM reports a 8.8 TVR on Monday , moving up to 9 TVR on Tuesday. The show slipped on Wednesday garnering a 8.4 TVR, but bounced back closing with a 10 TVR on Thursday.

"KBC has managed to become a programming success as it the highest rated show on television today. Whether the premium charged for the show is justified, is debatable. But if one accesses the first two weeks performance the 100% premium that has been charged seems okay," Nandini Dias, vice-president, Lodestar Media said.

She added that whether this kind of premium will be justified throughout the show's running would depend on whether the show can sustain its ratings.

However, Meenakshi Madhwani, media auditor, Spatial Access differs, "Undoubtedly, the show has managed a decent start as it is hovering between 8-10 TVR, but seems to have failed in meeting the expectations of advertisers, who were committed a 15 - 20 TVR.

Since that has not happened, I'm sure that advertisers will look at a cost adjustment through bonus time given on the network as the channel will not reduce the outlays."

Countering Madhwani's comment, Joshi said, "We don't do rating guarantees on such things. In any case even if her hypothesis about a 15 TRP guarantee was assumed to be correct, this would have been basis the old TAM panel and not the extended one that only launched this year.

Remember that the sponsorship deals were done in Dec 06. We saw that the launch episode 12+ GRPs we got delivered a much higher audience than KBC 2's launch episode's 19+ GRP. Interpolating from this, we can see that Meenakshi's alleged guarantee would be generally met."