BENGALURU: The puerile on-air ratings squabble between one of the biggest names in Indian media Bennett Coleman’s Times Group’s Indian English News channel Times Now and the startup Republic TV now led by the former’s editor in chief, Arnab Goswami, continued without abating.
As is their wont every Thursday after the release of Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) ratings data, both the biggest players in the Indian English Television News genre continued boasting about how each was number one in the genre. This spat has been going on since the very first week that Republic TV data was published – this was data for week 19 of 2017 (Saturday, 6 May 2017 to Friday 12 May 2017).
Each channel slices and dices BARC weekly data for the genre in the manner that makes it appear the best and touts the results on its respective channel.
So how did they fare in BARC’s weekly list of top 5 English News channels for week 38 of 2017 (Saturday, 16 September 2017 to Friday, 22 September 2017) today? Let’s take a dekko at the BARC ratings numbers for All India (U+R) : NCCS AB : Males 22+ Individuals. Based on BARC’s demographics, Republic TV has led the English News genre right from the very first week of its launch – it is now 20 weeks that it has held the pole position for.
Republic TV continued to rule the top 5 channels in the English News genre list for week 38 of 2017 with 0.904 million weekly impressions, higher than the previous week’s 0.871 million weekly impressions. Times Now’s ratings also increased in week 38 as compared to week 37 by 20,000 impressions. The channel scored 0.791 million weekly impressions in week 38 as compared to 0.771 million weekly impressions in week 37.
CNN News 18 was placed third in week 38 of 2107 with a steady 0.347 million weekly impressions – the channel was placed fourth in the previous week with approximately the same weekly impressions. India Today Television lost a rank and 4,000 weekly impressions in week 38 as compared to week 37 of 2017. The channel notched fourth rank with 0.343 million weekly impressions in week 38 as compared to 0.347 million weekly impressions and third rank in week 37 of 2017.
NDTV 24x7 reentered the list and completed the top five channels quintet in week 38 of 2017 at rank 5 with 0.331 million weekly impressions. In week 37, it was BBC World News that was ranked 5 with the same number of weekly impressions - 0.331 million.
