Pepsi Indian Premier League (IPL) – season 6 has just started, and the cumulative number of viewers has already reached 100 million in its first five matches, reveals the first week’s TAM (Television Audience Measurement) viewership data of T20 league.
According to Navin Khemka, managing partner of ZenithOptimedia India, the quality of the matches has been keeping up such a good rating. More than hundred million people have watched matches on both MAX and SIX until now, and the number is certainly very impressive. None of the first five matches was prejudiced or boring which has helped add to the levels of interest as well as excitement of the viewers largely.
In comparison with the previous year, this year’s rating has gone higher significantly. Last year, even though there were six matches per week, IPL season 5 managed to reach only 79 million viewers on MAX. It is not only the high ratings of sports channels that indicate the towering popularity of IPL-6, but also the loss of Gross Rating Points (GRPs) of the Hindi General Entertainment Channels (GEC) genre also depicts the same.
“Again, the quality of matches resulted in higher gains for MAX and thus higher loss of GECs. Last year, while the GEC genre was hit by just 50 GRPs in first week, this time the loss is 100 GRPs”, said Mr. Khemka.
However, though the number of viewers has increased amazingly, the Television Rating Points (TVRs) of the matches have gone down to some extent this year.
The first match of IPL-6 was between Kolkata Knight Riders and Delhi Daredevils, which clocked a 4.1 TVR in the All India Market (AIM) as well as a 4.5 TVR in the Hindi Speaking Markets (HSM). On the other hand, the first match of IPL-5, which was held between Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians, obtained a 5.5 TVR in the All India Market (AIM) while the same for the Hindi Speaking Markets (HSM) was 5.9.
If the average TVR of the first week’s matches of the T20 league is considered, we can see that the TVRs are 3.8 and 4 in the AIM and the HSMs this year, while for the last season of the league; these were 3.9 and 4.1 respectively.
According to the Executive Vice President and Business Head of MAX, Neeraj Vyas, it is, basically, the changing viewership universe boosting the number of audience greatly.
The league has been going through the second phase of Digital Addressable Systems implementation this year. In addition, LC1 towns have been added to the monitoring system recently by the TV Ratings Monitoring Agency (TMA), which also has a great impact on the number of viewers.