BENGALURU: This is the second week in a row after the tenth season of the Indian Premier League (IPL 10) that good movies have found a place for Sony Pictures Network (SPN) Hindi Movies channel Sony Max in the weekly top 10 channels list across genre. The Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) list of top 10 channels for week 25 (Saturday, 17 June 2017 to Friday, 23 June 2017) has Sony Max at sixth rank with 543.438 million weekly impressions, far improved from the ninth rank with 460.016 million weekly impressions for week 24. The movies Bahubali - The Beginning, King Kong, Double Attack 2 and Sooryavansham, which were among the five most watched weekly programmes in the Hindi Movies and Hindi Movies Urban markets seemed to have helped in the presence and escalation of the movie channel in a list that is generally dominated by either GECs’ or channels that air sports events aka cricket.
Three channels from the SPN stable, two channels each from the Sun TV Networks, Viacom 18 and Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (Zeel) stables and one from the Star India group made it to the BARC India weekly top 10 channels across genres list for week 25 of 2017. Putting it another way – One channel each from the Tamil GEC, Telugu GEC and Hindi Movies genres and seven channels from the Hindi GEC genre made up the BARC weekly top 10 channels list for week 25.
With the end of the ICC Champions Trophy 2017 in the early part of week 24, Star India’s Star Sports 1 Hindi exited the weekly top ten channels across genres in week 25. Sun TV continued to lead the list at first place with 1017.773 million weekly impressions, followed by Star India’s flagship Hindi GEC channel Star Plus with 640.486 million impressions at second place. Zeel’s Hindi GEC Zee Anmol was at third place with 581.906 million weekly impressions followed by SPN’s Hindi GEC women centric channel Sony Pal with 563.41 million impressions at fourth rank – a rank that the channel has retained for the third week in a row.
Network 18 (Viacom 18) channel Rishtey was at fifth place with 550.796 million weekly impressions – this was the fourth week in a row that Rishtey maintained the fifth place in BARC’s weekly top 10 channels across genre list. As mentioned above, Sony Max was at sixth place, followed by another Viacom 18 channel – its flagship Hindi GEC – Colors with 525.45 million weekly impressions at seventh place. Colors had been ranked tenth in the previous week.
Zeel’s flagship Hindi GEC Zee TV with 516.04 million weekly impressions was at eighth place followed by the Sun Network’s Telugu flagship GEC Gemini TV with 493.489 million weekly impressions at ninth place. SPN’s Hindi channel specializing in comedy and lighthearted drama shows – Sony Sab completed the dectet with 454.614 million weekly impressions.
