What are you watching?

A recent study has thrown up some interesting statistics. It says, people in Assam and the Northeastern Region are watching television news for much more duration every day in comparison to people living in other regions and states of India. According to the study, people in Assam and the Northeast are on an average watching TV news for 50 minutes and 9 seconds every day. In comparison, average time spent per day by people in other regions and states is pretty less. In Kerala, the report says, people are on an average watching TV news for 40 minutes and 38 seconds. It is very low in Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir put together as a region – only 25 minutes and 43 seconds. This is almost half less than Assam and the Northeast. The study has been attributed to the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC), an organization which monitors TV ownership and viewership habits in India. Among other regions and states, people in Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Rajashan watch TV news only for 29 minutes and 30 seconds per day, while it is 30 minutes 31 seconds each in Maharashtra and Goa. People of Karnataka, on the other hand, spend 35 minutes 32 seconds per day watching TV news, while in Bihar and Jharkhand it is as low as 23 minutes and one second. The reasons behind people in the Northeast spending more time watching TV news, however, were not immediately known, because BARC has stopped putting out such data free of cost in its website or on any other public domain. According to the BARC website, the Broadcast India survey it conducted in 2018 showed that TV viewership in India has shot up by 12% since 2016. According to BARC, this indicates that Indian viewers have remained invested in television sets despite the proliferation of smartphones and cheap data, which have fuelled the rise of on-demand entertainment networks like Hotstar and Netflix. While BARC has stopped releasing its findings from this year on its website and shares them only with subscribers, its website does provide some interesting characteristics about Indian television viewers throughs its past surveys. According to its Broadcast India Survey for 2018, there are 298 million homes in India, of which 197 million homes have TV sets, but among them again, the majority – 98 per cent homes – have only a single TV. The survey also revealed that 82 per cent of the TV-watching people of India watch TV together. It says that for Indians, entertainment has always meant time with family and friends and this reflects in TV watching habits as well. Evening is the time when most people in India watch television together with other family members and friends and sometimes with neighbours too, it said.