Doordarshan stole a march over its peers with a masterstroke. It pulled out classics from yesteryears like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Shreekrishna, Shaktiman etc., in what turned out to be a clever programming strategy.
According to the yearly report of BARC, The reruns of the classic catapulted DD National among pole Position among GECs and the viewership contribution of Mythological shows to the Hindi Genre spiked from a mere 14% pre- covid to 43% by Week 15 of 2020.
The viewership of DD Network witnessed a 68% growth in 2020 as compared to 2019. The GEC genre contributed the highest to the network with a growth of 115%. DD National and DD Bharati leapfrogged exponentially, by over 5X and 10X respectively. Doordarshan’s share in all-India Total Viewing increased from 1.2 % last year to 1.8% in 2020.
DD Retro which was relaunched during lockdown quickly jumped up the ladder to feature in the Top Channel list of Doordarshan. Advertisers quickly leveraged DD’s spike in viewership leading to a 31 % increase in Advertising Volumes on DD Channels as compared to 2019. GECs gained the most with 33% increase followed by News Channels at 28% and infotainment with 13%.
The report further stated that DD Sports witnessed a dip of 17% in Advertising Volumes compared to 2019 with Live Sporting events ruled out by the Pandemic.
