BENGALURU: As IPL 10 came to a close, the Sun TV Networks' Tamil flagship GEC Sun TV regained its top spot in Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) weekly list of top 10 channels across genre: All India (U+R): 2+ Individuals in week 20 Saturday, 13 May 2017 to Friday, 19 May 2017.
IPL 10 viewership supremacy across genres
During its run, IPL 10 channels ruled the air with Indians lapping up the live event, more so during primetime. TV viewership declines during the summer months according to BARC. IPL 10 is probably one of the factors that helped retard this seasonal viewership decline.
IPL 10 commenced on Wednesday, 5 April 2017 (in BARC week 14). The mega T20 cricket bonanza played by 8 teams comprising of over 200 players including 72 international players concluded with the finals on Sunday, 21 May 2017, after 60 matches spread over 47 days.
BARC week 14 commenced on Saturday, 1 April 2017 and ended on Friday, 7 April 2017. Three days of play with three matches played happened in week 14. The event concluded in the beginning of week 21 – only one match was played during that week. Ten matches were played during each of BARC weeks15, 16,and 18. Nine matches were played in weeks17 (one match was rained out in week 17) and 19 and seven planned for week 20, with just one in week 21 as mentioned above.
The excitement built up for the event saw IPL 10 recording the highest viewership for the season in week 15 for all the Sony Pictures Network (SPN) channels that broadcast the event – the two Hindi Movie channels – Sony Max and two Sports channel’s Sony Six.(English) and Sony ESPN (commentary in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Hindi).
Week 20: Top 10 channels list across genres
One channel each from the Tamil GEC, Telugu GEC and Hindi Movies spaces and seven channels from the Hindi GEC space were present in the weekly top 10 channels list across genres in week 20. Of these, three were from the Sony Pictures Network India (SPN) network, two each from the Network 18 (or Viacom 18), Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (Zeel) and the Sun TV Network stables, and one from the Star India Network.
Sun TV and Sony Max exchanged ranks while Star Plus, Sony Pal, Zee TV, Gemini TV, Colors, Zee Anmol, Rishtey retained their week 19 ranks of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 respectively. Zee Telugu exited the list in week 20 to be replaced with Sony Sab.
As mentioned above, Sun TV once again topped BARC’s weekly top 10 channels list after a hiatus of 5 weeks with 10,41,591 Impressions (000s) Sums followed by Sony Max with 9,83,279Impressions (000s) Sums at second place.Please refer to the figure below for the list of top 10 channels across genres for week 20:
