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Television Viewership

TAM Media Research, the TV Ratings Company, today released an exhaustive and
thought provoking study on media viewership. The study reveals an exceptional
spurt in the viewership levels of News Channels as compared to other genres for the
specified period.

Television, today, a medium of mass entertainment, has become an integral part of

almost every household. Though it was considered a luxury in the early times,
television in present times has become a necessity. Television or TV has emerged to
be an important source of knowledge and entertainment. Ideally the perfect research
database would contain media consumption characteristics of each and every
individual in the target group. Such a database would provide exact information
about the target group, but the cost of maintaining such a system would be
astronomical. Researchers settle for an economical system of sampling where a
sample set of individuals would represent the universe of target audience within
acceptable limits of error. The average number of times households or persons
viewed a given program, station or advertisement during a specific time period, such
as one month,the average frequency would be the exposures per person or
household. Online video is changing the nature of Internet use—consistently drawing
larger audiences and time. All evidence suggests that this growth is happening in
tandem with TV growth, rather than at its expense.

VIEWERSHIP SHARE OF THREE HINDI SPEAKING METROS:

The three Hindi Speaking Metro’s combined together account for almost one fourth
of all India Viewership and around 41% of all Viewership in Hindi Speaking Markets
thus it obviously becomes important to study the same in much greater detail.
 View
Viee

AVERAGE TIME SPENT WATCHING TELEVISION:

Firstly, let’s see how much time each metro spends on an average watching
television in a week. The chart below indicates average time spend by an individual
in the given markets watching television. The data stated as under is a weekly
average of last 26 weeks (almost six months)

Rest910
O f (15h
H ind
Speaking M ar
59%
Mumbai tops the chart with 15 hrs and 12min per week as compared to Kolkata

Rest Of India
which spends around 14 hrs and 48 min, and Delhi hangs in the middle with 14 hrs
and 54 min.

75%
VIEWERSHIP PATTERN ACROSS ANY AVERAGE DAY:
n min
Now having known the time spent on television, it’s now important to know the
Viewership spread across the day. The chart below indicates how a viewer watches
television on any average day.

35

30

The above chart clearly indicates that different dayparts are ruled by different
metros. While Delhi gains in the mornings, Mumbai gains in the prime time and late
nights and Kolkata rules most of the afternoon and evening dayparts.

Looking at the Viewership shares across dayparts the above inferences become
even starker.
25
 35

MU
30
Now, having identified the dayparts and the leading metros in those dayparts, let’s
try and find out what is watched and when…

GENRE PREFERENCES ACROSS DIFFERENT DAYPARTS

25
The charts below are a comparison of shares of different genres in the morning
daypart.
rship Share %

20

Regio
 Mumb

UC
2%
Source: TAM peoplemeter System

TG: CS 4+

Media specialists now work harder as they get more complex data from so many
channels. Channel share fragmentation is not a new phenomenon but with return on
investment (ROI) going down over the years, it has become more challenging for

Regional
media professionals to give their clients the right advice to enable them to build
sustainable brands in a profitable way. Media segmentation proves helpful for
specific categories which are trying to reach out to specific audiences and want to
stay away from traditional mass media.
20%
There is a significant overlap between DVR and streaming use, particularly among
those who spend the most time viewing time shifted programming. This suggests
that once consumers have gotten used to the concept of time shifting, the platform
shift itself is less relevant To the degree that cord cutting does exist, it does not
appear to be a function of age, as is generally assumed. Older populations are more
likely to be consuming long-form online video.While some populations are shifting
time from TV to the internet, that population is less than a third of those who access
streaming content and, of those who do shift time, that vast majority has shifted 5
percent or less of their time. As the above numbers indicate, from 2002 to 2006,
there has been a significant growth in the TV, Color TV and CS penetration levels.
This augurs well for the broadcasting industry since there are more viewers
available. The latest technological advancement that has spurred the TV industry in
India is the advent of CAS and DTH.

These digital platforms allow the user to do away with the choice restrictions that a
normal cable connection had. The bouquet of Free to air channels is always
available through the digital platform and the Pay channels are accessible by the
user if he desires to pay for the subscription. With growing competition and shrinking
profits, the broadcasters looked forward to newer ways of revenue generation and
hence some of them made themselves as pay channels. The user will have to bear a
subscription cost to access these channels. There is a danger of losing viewership
because of this since some viewers might not be willing to pay an additional cost to
access the channel and might switch his loyalty to a competitor’s channel. Here the
choice is completely the user’s and not the cable operator’s As seen in the table
below, the number of active channels has gone up from 126 in 2000 to 308 in 2006.
There is a drastic increase in the competition even within niche genres. This intense
competition drives the industry to produce excellent content to be profitable in the
business of attracting the attention of viewers.

Today there are more than three hundred plus channels. With this virtual explosion
of TV channels, the advertiser is confronted with high media fragmentation. While it
makes it difficult for mass product marketers, the smaller advertiser has an option to
target specific audiences at lower rates. This report looks into these aspects in detail
and rovides valuable insights into the same.

Siddhartha Mukherjee
Head - Corporate Communications TAM Media Research
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Road
Chinchpokli (E)
Mumbai - 400 033, India
Tel: +91 22 23718103/8325/8912
Mobile: +91 9820452962
Fax: +91 22 23718086
E-mail: siddhartha@tamindia.com