FTA Channels Likely to Get More Viewership Than Paid Regional Channels Under New Trai Mandate

Over the last few years in India, regional content viewership has seen a massive rise with consumers attracted to their televisions. Broadcasters are also upping the ante with every passing day to air the content which will attract the users and glue them to their TVs. There are some popular channels across all the regional channels, but it’s said that the new tariff regime introduced by Trai will deliver a blow to the paid regional channels compared to those of FTA channels. If you look at the pricing of individual regional channels, they cost up to Rs 22 per month which is very high compared to what consumers to get in the past. As per various experts, the new tariff regime will likely affect the viewership of paid regional channels compared to the FTA channels as they come at Rs 153 per month.

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The Growth of Regional Channels and Increase in Content Quality

BARC India has also published data about the growth of these regional channels. According to this data, Bhojpuri saw a 134% increase, followed by 125% for Assamese, 89% for Oriya, 81% for Gujarati, 68% for Marathi, 55% for Bengali, 52% for Kannada, 34% for Punjabi, 23% for Hindi, 18% for Telugu and 17% for Tamil in the past two years. It is worth noting that along with the viewership of these channels, the advertising revenue has also gone up for them. Not only the general entertainment channels in these regional languages, but also movies and other channels have grown in the last two years, but with the new tariff regime, it is entirely possible that the situation of the paid regional channels might be threatened.

Dishum Broadcasting COO Partha Dey said to Indian Television that if the carriage deals are in place with distribution platform operators (DPOs), viewership of regional FTA channels will not be affected. He further said, “However, this may not hold true for long tail regional pay channels. Nevertheless, we may notice slight turbulence till the time Trai guidelines are fully implemented.”