BENGALURU: It is now 4 weeks since Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) started publishing segmented data of regional news channels in 4 languages in the public domain. Three of the languages are from East India – Assamese News, Bangla News and Oriya News and one is from West India – Marathi News. BARC commenced ranking the top 5 News channels in each of the markets represented by theses languages from week 35 of 2018 (Saturday, 25 August 2018 to Friday, 31 August 2018) onward.
The four languages from the middle portion (geographically) of the country represent the following markets/states:
Assamese News: Assam /North East/Sikkim (U+R): NCCS All: 2+ Individuals
Bangla News: West Bengal (U+R): NCCS All: 2+ Individuals
Marathi News: Maharashtra/Goa (U+R): NCCS All: 2+ Individuals
Oriya News: Odisha (U+R): NCCS All: 2+ Individuals
Geographically, it could be averred that these languages are from the middle regions of India.
Earlier, in week 1 of 2018 (Saturday, 30 December 2017 to Friday, 5 January 218), BARC had commenced publishing its weekly lists of Top 5 News channels for each of four South Indian languages – Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
In the case of the four mid Indian languages, the same five channels were present in BARC’s lists of top 5 News channels of all the four languages during all the four weeks that the data is available at the time of writing of this report. As a matter of fact, for three of the East Indian languages, all the five channels for each language followed the same order of ranks. In the case of Marathi News ranks showed a bit of an anomaly.
In general, the News channel for each of the four languages from mid India that has been ranked one had for more viewers that the channel that was ranked two. There was also a marked difference in viewership between a higher rank and its succeeding rank.
Please refer to the figures below showing how the News channels for each language were ranked and the rounded off average of four weeks weekly impressions in (000s):
As mentioned above there was an anomaly in ranks in the case of Marathi News channels.
It is early days yet to get an accurate measure of the performance of the top 5 News channels of each of the mid Indian languages. Time will rank the channels more correctly.
