Friday, December 12, 2008

Marathi TV channels lag behind in the "regional race"


Karnatique, a blog on Kannadiga World, gives some interesting analysis about "regional" TV channels. Even though there are more Marathi speakers than Tamilians in India, the revenue and viewership of the Tamil channels is far higher. But why?

The story starts after gulf war when Indian satellite TV market was born with Star TVSUN TV was the first “regional language” channel to be launched. Since then it has managed to innovate and hence dominate the Tamil psyche… The Telugu, Malayalam & Kannada channels followed soon. The speakers of languages like Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya and Punjabi were already exposed to Hindi channels. When channels in these languages final appeared at the turn of the century, their content was not as glitzy as the Hindi channels leading to poor viewership numbers. It is only in the last 3 years that quality of content in the Marathi & Bengali channels has improved drastically. Given the current trend, the share of revenue of the Marathi & Bengali channels is sure to improve over the next 4-5 years. 3M is surprised that the DNA report fails to speak about Gujarati, Punjabi & Oriya channels!

BTW Karnatique has given the “Languages ordered by decreasing order of speaker population” which is wrong… the correct order is Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya & Punjabi.

3M supports Karnatique when he protests against the attitude of media to bracket Hindi Channels as "National Channels"!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

The main hitch is TRP calculation. This is the most unscientific method on which market of thousands of crore is based. The sampling method is stupid and does not represent realistic proportion of the population. It has at its highest vagueness in city like Mumbai where multi lingual population exists. It is long back that Marathi people have stopped watching those sans bahu fame hindi opera & switched over to more decent & versatile Marathi channels.

Anonymous said...

Hi there, I am ardent follower of Karnatique & the way they give clarity to thoughts & ideas is overwhelming.

In current day scenario, Marathis & Kannadigas are facing the same rival which is THE GREAT INDIAN HINDI MENACE.

http://karnatique.blogspot.com/2009/01/maharashtras-kannadiga-history-and.html

Anonymous said...

Marathis and Kannadigas have so much in common with respect to the culture, the language & everything. We need to fight to gether this Hindi menace.

Anonymous said...

Hindi is not the national language. The Indian Constitution says it.

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