On TV, all eyes set at Games

The Commonwealth Games has caught more eyeballs than India’s favourite sport cricket but less than the season four of Big Boss, which got the rating of 3.6 per cent, television ratings released on Tuesday revealed, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 6, 2010, 01:20:12 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Commonwealth Games has caught more eyeballs than India’s favourite sport cricket but less than the season four of Big Boss, which got the rating of 3.6 per cent, television ratings released on Tuesday revealed.

“The Games caught more eyeballs in smaller towns and rural India where Doordarshan has better reach than cable television,” said a media expert with a television rating company, who was not willing to be quoted.

Doordarshan Director-General Aruna Sharma on Monday said that around 87 million homes in India watched the Games opening ceremony. This includes three million cable and satellite homes. Doordarshan covers more than 80 per cent of India through its terrestrial network of towers, which no other channel can match.

Television rating data provided by Audience Measurement and Analytics Limited (aMap) said that 2.8 per cent of viewers in cable and satellite homes watched the four-hour long opening ceremony on Sunday.

The rating was lesser than that for season four of Big Boss, whose inaugural show was hosted by Salman Khan on Sunday night, almost same time when the opening ceremony was being shown. “The rating for the opening ceremony fell in the later half apparently as it was too long,” the expert said.

However, Doordarshan’s overall market share in viewership has increased to more than 14 per cent, which is more than double of what the national broadcaster had received in the past couple of months.

The extravaganza of the opening ceremony had some impact on audience with the Games getting better rating than India’s favourite sports cricket on Monday during India-Australia Test match that was played in Mohali.

As many as 1.68 crore people watched the Games on Doordarshan in cable homes as compared to just 74 lakh, who watched the Test match on Neo Sports. Overall, the Doordarshan viewership would be much higher as the data does not include coverage of its terrestrial network.

“The variety of sports on Doordarshan caught people’s attention,” the media expert said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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