Sun TV continues to hold its position as the No. 1 Tamil general entertainment television, but recent Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) data shows that the winds are shifting.
The market leader is losing market share while Star Vijay and Zee Tamil are making substantial gains.
A report by Kotak Institutional Equities has confirmed what has long been talked about: the Sun Network’s viewership share has declined in the Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam markets.
The report says: “Flagship channel Sun TV’s weighted viewership share is down 380 basis points (quarter on quarter) to 46.9% in the first quarter so far. It is down 11 percentage points from last year. Even more worrying is the downward trajectory over April 1-June 8, 2018.”
Many reasons are being cited to explain the changing landscape and the slip of the market leader: impact and availability of streaming content, changing tastes of the audience demographic and unfavourable political conditions.
The gainers--Star Vijay and Zee Tamil--claim that their market share has increased by at least 10%.
Credit to Bigg Boss
Speaking about how Star Vijay managed to capture a significant space in the market, Krishnan Kutty, General Manager, Star Vijay, said that reality television show Bigg Boss, which is being hosted by actor Kamal Haasan for the second consecutive year, has fundamentally changed the channel’s fortunes. “It has taken us to the next level. We had a 12-13% market share in Tamil general entertainment segment. After Bigg Boss, we grew to almost 20 %, not just during the show, but we also maintained the market share in the last three quarters,” said Mr. Kutty.
The success of Bigg Boss prompted the channel to sign Kamal Haasan again despite the actor launching a political party and announcing that he will contest elections.
While there is a perception that reality television has changed the rules of the game, television executives insist that fiction shows remain the audience’s favourite. Explaining the steady growth of Zee Tamil, Siju Prabhakar, Cluster Head, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited, said that Zee Tamil now boasts of a 20% market share, a growth of 15% in the last two-and-a-half years.
“We have focused on all-round growth and concentrated on developing both our non-fiction and fiction shows,” he said.
He underlined that the growth is still very fiction-focused. “We managed to get 300-plus gross rating points for our fiction and we had 2 of our shows in the list of Top 10 most-watched shows,” he said.
Prabhakar said that the key to Zee’s success has been its ability to discern the audience’s changing tastes.
“We have romantic dramas and fantasy thrillers. Audience tastes are changing and we have delivered for them, which is how we have captured our market. The channel is still a work in progress,” he added.
Sun TV officials could not be reached for comment.
