Chennai sources reported that weekly data released by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) shows that Tamil news viewership witnessed a massive spike between August 4 and August 10 compared to previous weeks. Meanwhile the former Tamilnadu Chief Minister and DMK President M Karunanidhi passed away on August 7. Furthermore according to the BARC data between Saturday, 4 August 2018, to Friday, 10 August 2018, the top 5 Tamil news television channels made a combined impression of 4,03,890.
Reports added that this demonstrated a 156% spike in viewership from the previous weekly update, which registered an impression of 209 million between July 14 to August 3. Meanwhile BARC India defines an impression as, “Number of individuals in 000s of a target audience who viewed an ‘Event’, averaged across minutes and also known as TVT.”
As per report, television audiences in Chennai spent two hours and forty three
minutes watching the news compared to the thirty two minute average witnessed
in the previous weeks. Moreover the newspaper also reports that this was the
second such spike in viewership after the death of former Tamilnadu Chief
Minister and AIADMK General Secretary J Jayalalitha in 2016 and presently the
Tamil news genre witnessed 734 million impressions that week.
