SRK steals Gen Next hearts on KBC

A dipstick survey shows that Gen Next lapped up Shahrukh Khan's casual demeanour, reports Gurbir Singh.

KBC-3, which opened to a huge media promotion, kept people indoors. Roads were deserted, and evening dates were cancelled to check out how well SRK performed. A dipstick survey showed that Gen Next loved Shahrukh Khan's casual demeanour. However, the middle-aged and the elderly, fed on Amitabh Bachchan's KBC-1 era, thought Big-B made his guests more comfortable, and built up suspense better.

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What do the television viewership figures indicate? The first-day response was huge with 11.3 million people watching the show, confirms Audience Measurement & Analytics (a-Map), a television viewership tracker for key cities in towns. As many as 1.6 million people switched on their TV sets just to watch KBC, a-MAP said.

For the channel STAR Plus, the news was great. In the north, west and east India, KBC opened with a channel share of 24.4 per cent, almost double the 12.4 per cent STAR Plus got for the previous Mondays of 2007. In the process most other competing channels, as well as news channels, lost eyeballs. For instance, Zee TV's Ratings percentage (TVRs) fell from 3.02 to 2.76 while Hindi News channels collectively fell from 1.88 to 1.54.

The viewership data shows the previous season KBC-2 and the July 2000 KBC-1 performed better on first day comparisons. On August 5, 2005 when KBC opened with Bachchan, STAR Plus got a market share of 34.2 per cent in Mumbai and 33.2 percent in Delhi. In comparison SRK's opening on Monday gave STAR Plus a channel share of 20 percent in Mumbai and 14.9 per cent in Delhi.