TV viewers in rural areas rise 10%: Barc
NEW DELHI: Even as smartphone reach widens across the country, Indians are not letting go of their traditional television sets, particularly in rural areas. According to data from the Broadcast
India 2018 Survey conducted by Barc (Broadcast Audience Research Council), TV penetration in the country is driven by rural India that witnessed a 10% growth from 2016 to 2018.
Growth in urban India, stood at 4% compared to 2016, on the other hand. Barc India is the country’s TV viewership monitoring agency.
TV penetration in rural India went up from 99 million in 2016 to 109 million in 2018 while in India’s megacities it rose from 20 million to 21 million. Barc’s survey also shows a 6.9% increase in male TV viewers (from 401 million to 429 million) versus a 7.5 % jump in female TV viewers (from 378 million to 407 million) as compared to 2016. The TV viewership jump comes even as people have turned to online streaming.
Ficci-EY media and entertainment industry report 2017 estimates 481 million internet users in India with 186 million coming from rural areas and 295 million from urban.
The number of smartphones sold in the country by Q4 2017 were 127 million while 250 million people viewed videos online in 2017 for news as well as entertainment. But as is obvious, TV isn’t going away in a hurry.
“One reason for preference for TV is the size of the screen, sound and picture quality,” said Abneesh Roy, an analyst with Edelweiss Securities.
“Only if the household has one TV set does the phone come in,” he said, adding that the advent of state broadcaster Doordarshan’s free-to-air (direct-to-home (DTH) platform DD Free Dish is hugely responsible for the continuing dependence on TV in rural areas. DD’s Free Dish DTH is free, which means apart from a one-time spend on equipment like a set-top box and a dish, consumers have no monthly subscription fee to shell out. Rural audiences are, therefore, hooked to the dated content on these channels.