According to this article, viewers are rapidly shifting to OTT which is leading to massive decline in viewership in television.
Blue : Highlighted areas
Key points from the article down below :-
• In past years, a segment of 8 million people was classified as heavy IPL viewers. These people used to spend 1,200 minutes or more on an IPL season. But this year, this number has either diminished or vanished. “Of the 8 million, 2.7 million viewers are still there, but they are no longer heavy viewers. That segment, you can argue, establishes that IPL viewership has dropped. However, the remaining 5.3 million seem to have fallen off the map and no longer exist. That you could argue is a function of the panel being reset," said the person, adding that this may not be the single definitive reason behind the decline.
• Nearly 10 million pay TV homes have disconnected their cable or Direct-to-Home (DTH) connections in the last two years, he added. In the metros, people may be cord-cutting to join streaming platforms, while in semi-urban and rural areas, viewers are switching to Doordarshan’s free-to-air DTH platform Free Dish.
• Several TV channel executives Mint spoke to privately admitted that there have been sudden and unexplained changes in viewership data. Several pay TV channels—both news and entertainment in Hindi and regional languages—have registered lower viewership.
• A sure-shot winner like Naagin on Colors, besides other reality TV shows, has seen its ratings plunge. Hindi and regional news channels too have seen their audiences thin. “Channel owners are flummoxed and at their wits’ end trying to figure out what’s wrong. They have been raising queries with BARC though there are no clear answers yet," said an executive at a broadcast network. “The entire ecosystem seems to have been disrupted," added another.
• A BARC executive explained the panel homes have not been reset. BARC has meters in 40,000 homes and at an estimated 4.5 to 5 people per home, it monitors viewership habits of 230,000 people. But to extrapolate the 200,000+ viewership to 1 billion people, it does a baseline survey every two years which has a sample size of 300,000 to 400,000 people. It studies their viewership behaviour, profile, and demographics and is used to pro-ject the panel homes.
• “So, BARC took the Indian Readership Survey 2019 and did the extrapolation on that basis. This change in viewership pattern may have been caused by that as possibly in that the pay TV versus free TV homes ratio may be skewed. Free TV homes may have artificially gone up," said the executive, cautioning that even this was a hypothesis. “Once the new baseline study is completed in September-October, we will know what happened to the viewers."
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/another-twist-in-the-tale-of-falling-ipl-viewership-11651695552885.html#aoh=16517473234308&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.livemint.com%2Fopinion%2Fcolumns%2Fanother-twist-in-the-tale-of-falling-ipl-viewership-11651695552885.html
Edited by Arko1 - 3 years ago