Chennai: Almost a year before Star India’s Tamil GEC, Vijay TV has witnessed a threat to its No. 2 GEC position in Tamil Nadu market, a place that was held by the channel comfortably for many years and remained as the destination for advertisers who wanted to spend their money in a platform, which has matured urban audience.
Zee Tamil with its over night luck of stolen numbers from Polimer TV and by virtue of better positioning of its channel on Arasu Cable TV (placed next to Sun TV in most of the places in Tamil Nadu) that managed to spike its numbers up in a short tenure, came as a blow to Vijay TV.
The Channel that was shaken and clueless about the sudden raise of Zee Tamil took its time to set right the things and pin the loopholes to put a water tight programming strategy to bounce back to its original position.
The story of shifting the dubbed version of Kumkuma Bhagya (titled in Tamil as Iru Malargal) from Polimer TV to Zee Tamil almost with same title and in the same time band on the very succeeding Monday is the best example of unethical practices in media industry , where in Zee Group’s syndication team has broken the deal in Mid way (after airing 200 episodes) just because the program was delivering good numbers to Polimer TV. The shifting helped Zee Tamil to plow the viewership to its platform. Soon, it emerged as channel driver in matter of few weeks and also helped them to develop a time-band following it, which in-turn resulted in the increase of fiction GRP of the channel, despite no much of efforts being made by Zee Tamil on fiction front rather than just launching two new shows, which were finalised by the previous fiction team who were shunted out after Mr. Siju Prabhakaran took over the affairs of the channel as Business Head from Mr. NS Easwaran.
| VijayTv Vs Zee Tamil – BARC GRP – Week 13 to 18 of 2017 | ||||||
| Week 13 | Week 14 | Week 15 | Week 16 | Week 17 | Week 18 | |
| Zee Tamil | 306 | 278 | 280 | 253 | 296 | 297 |
| STAR Vijay | 331 | 330 | 380 | 345 | 351 | 352 |
| Difference | 25 | 52 | 100 | 92 | 55 | 55 |
This proves that anything that comes easily without much of efforts wont last longer and with the fading craze for the dubbed version of Kumkuma Bhagya the fiction line-up of Zee Tamil is failing to sustain. A bunch of non-fiction experts dominating the fiction front of Zee Tamil is also a factor that is hindering the growth of the channel.Going forward Vijay TV has the scope of bettering the difference further with the launch of inaugural season of big-ticket reality show BiggBoss Tamil that also marks the television debut of actor Kamal Haasan as the host for the show.The study over the past six weeks GRPs of both the channel shows that Vijay TV is in commanding No. 2 position over Zee Tamil with considerable lead and its is showing a trend of surging difference between the them.
Zee Tamil’s initial growth was compared with that of Zee Kannada. However, industry observers feel that Zee Kannada’s growth was a due to the valiant and continued efforts of Mr. Raghavendra Hunsur who ascended from being an Executive Producer to Business Head of the channel purely because of his knowledge and expertise without any luck factor or unethical business practice.
