Ramayan records 17 cr viewers for DD in first weekend, YouTube numbers double

BARC-Nielsen report says 9.1 crore saw Ramayan episode on Sunday while DD officials say the show along with Mahabharat & Shaktimaan have doubled Doordarshan’s YouTube traffic.

A still from Ramayan | YouTube

New Delhi: The re-telecast of Ramayan appears to have yielded rich dividends for Doordarshan with the provisional numbers indicating a surge in viewership of the state-owned broadcaster.

According to provisional data with the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC)-Nielsen, the Ramayan episode aired on DD National Sunday evening recorded the highest viewership by any show since 2015 in the Hindi General Entertainment Channel category. The BARC only began collating such data in 2015.

Two episodes of Ramayan are being telecast every day, at 9 am and 9 pm.

The numbers, however, are provisional and are based on only the first two days of the telecast — Saturday and Sunday. The viewership figures for the week, which will reflect the growth in DD National’s viewership since the show began, will be released by BARC next Thursday.

The provisional figures revealed that the viewership for Ramayan peaked on Sunday evening, with figures touching 51 million (5.1 crore) viewers from 34 million (3.4 crore) viewers on Saturday morning when the first episode of the series was aired. The show was also the highest rated in urban areas, including the metropolis’.

The show garnered 45 million (4.5 crore) viewers on Saturday evening and 40 million (4 crore) viewers on Sunday morning.

In all, the four episodes of Ramayan on Saturday and Sunday garnered an average of 28.7 million ( 2.87 crore) impressions and 6.9 billion (690 crore) viewing minutes.

The data is for the Hindi speaking markets band.

DD’s YouTube viewership surges as well

Doordarshan’s re-telecast of both Ramayan along with a series of other iconic series, such as Mahabharat, Circus and Byomkesh Bakshi, began Saturday and a specific number of episodes of all shows will be aired during the 21-day lockdown period.

Both DD National and DD Bharati have since added other other iconic shows in the re-telecast list such as Buniyad, Shaktimaan, Shriman Shrimati, among others.

Sources in the DD said that apart from the BARC viewership figures, digital traffic for all DD channels on YouTube has seen a 100 per cent surge.

“Initially, it was a combination of Ramayan and Mahabharat (that grossed the highest numbers) but since yesterday (Wednesday) Shaktimaan too has contributed to the traffic,” a DD official told ThePrint.

While a limited number of episodes from the shows will be re-telecast during the lockdown period, the process for requisitioning these shows have been continuing for the last few months.

TV, news channels numbers up

The TV data is from the BARC-Nielsen Report on “Crisis consumption–An Insights Series into TV, Smartphone & Audiences” released Thursday.

It shows that in week 12, starting 21 March, the total TV consumption grew 37 per cent as compared to viewership between 11 and 31 January, which the report has classified as the pre-coronavirus period.

The report also states that viewership of news and movies across languages recorded an all time high growth at 298 per cent and 56 per cent respectively in the same period.

According to the report, the share of news genre on television at all-India level in both prime time and non prime time grew from 7 per cent to 21 per cent, as compared to GECs which went down to 39 per cent from 52 per cent.

The report also revealed the daily free commercial time determining advertisements, recorded a growth of 15 per cent or 6 lakh seconds in the post-Covid-19 period in the weeks 11 and 12, which is between 14 March and 24 March.