MUMBAI: With larger-than-life and good stories, the southern movies industry has been spurting to a new high as around 860 hours of the run time of movies have been consumed by the audience on the small screen in the last one year period from November 2018 to October 2019.
The report released by THiNK in association with BARC focuses on the movies released from four southern states of India – Andhra Pradesh/Telangana (Tollywood), Tamil Nadu/Pondicherry (Kollywood), Karnataka (Sandalwood) and Kerala (Mollywood).
The report said that around 43 per cent of movies belonged to the south – Telugu (11 per cent), Tamil (9 per cent), Kannada (6.1 per cent) and Malayalam (5.6 per cent), whereas the dubbed Hindi movies contributed to at least 11 per cent.
Meanwhile, the report also mentioned that the movies originating from south clocked at least 135 billion hours of viewing minutes annually, which is 2.6 billion hours per week on average. And, 26000 unique movies were broadcasted over 279 channels across 16 languages last year, the report added.
The report quotes that the overall movies clocked 17 per cent of airtime out of 4.9 millions of programming hours on television annually, in which the south languages have taken the larger share from the overall air time in terms of movie that contributed 23 per cent.
Contribution of movies to total viewership on television is around 30 per cent from 17 per cent of airtime, and alone south languages movies contribute to 42 per cent viewership from 23 per cent airtime, also added the report.
With one third viewership of movies, it is a winning content on television as it is positively indexed over airtime and this index is higher for some languages vis-à-vis others given the differing nature of television viewing and content preference across audiences and geographies.
Meanwhile, the report also suggests the reasons how viewership is southern India is different from others. It said: “Average daily tune-ins in each of the southern states are higher than the national average; number of channels showing movies are higher than in other regional languages.”
Similarly, “Regional language viewership share is highest in the southern states; and almost half of total unique titles (12429 out of 26143) aired are from the four south languages,” the report also said.
Apparently, out of the total 193 channels that telecast movies on television, more than half (104) belong to the four South languages; the major share came from Tamil and Telugu movies.
When comparing the per capita movie consumption across movies of different languages, southern languages topped the list with each of the four clocking more than 200 hours per capita per annum (PCPA). In which, Telugu was highest at 415 hours, which roughly translated into 2- 3 movies weekly per person in the universe, on an average, followed by Tamil at 293 hours.
