4 South languages contribute to 35% of overall movies viewership, ahead of Hindi

India is home to one of the largest film industries in the world. As a programme genre, feature films/ movies are the largest contributors to television viewership at 30 per cent, followed by drama/ soaps at 25 per cent. The strong affinity for movies makes it a mainstay in most media plans. 

Among all the markets in India, South India makes and consumes movies on a large scale vis-a-vis the other parts of the country. The per capita per annum consumption of respective regional movies range from a whopping 415 hours in Andhra Pradesh/ Telangana to 206 hours in Karnataka. In comparison, Hindi movies in HSM clock 125 hours of per capita perannum consumption. Four South languages account for 32 per cent of airtime of all movies on television. And along with dubbed movies, most of which are from South, the number rises to 42 per cent. 

The Broadcast Audience Research Council’s (BARC) latest THiNK Newsletter, titled ‘Viewership of Movies in South India’, focuses on the performance of movies in the states of Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh/ Telangana, Tamil Nadu/ Pondicherry. 

Giving a breakdown of the movie content screened on television between the months November 2018 and October 2019, BARC states that during this period, 17 per cent of the content aired was movie content. Individually, Hindi content contributes the most in terms of supply of movie content (23 per cent of total movies duration telecast) and well as total movie viewership (31 per cent), movies in the four South languages combined are higher in both areas, contributing to 32 per cent of total movies telecast and 35 per cent of overall movie viewership. Out of the total 193 channels that telecast movies on television, more than half (104) belong to the 4 South languages. 

A total 859K hours was the combined run time of movies on the small screen in the last 12 month period from November 2018 to October 2019. Movies originating from the South clocked 135 billion hours of viewing minutes annually, which is 2.6 billion hours per week on an average. In terms of duration of movies on television, 43 per cent of movies belonged to South: Telugu (11%), Tamil (9%), Kannada (6.1%) and Malayalam (5.6%); dubbed Hindi movies contributed 11 per cent.

Out of the 4.9 million programming hours on television annually, movies clocked 17 per cent of airtime in the same period. The contribution of movies to total programming content varies across languages. South languages are higher in terms of movie contribution at 23 per cent. 

South languages movies contribute to 42 per cent viewership from 23 per cent airtime, which is much higher than the 30 per cent pan India contribution of movies. 

South viewership is different on many counts due to: 

• Average daily tune-ins in each of the Southern states is higher than the national average.
• Number of channels showing movies is higher than other regional languages.
• Regional language viewership share is highest in the Southern states.
• Almost half of total unique titles (12,429 out of 26,143) aired are from the 4 South languages.

In the South megacities like Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad, movies commanded 7.02 per cent of the total TV viewership. Premium South audiences love their Telugu and Tamil content, with English content coming third in terms of viewership.