Thursday, May 5, 2011

Osama beats royal wedding in viewership war

Death of Osama bin Laden overshadowed recent television events including royal wedding of Price William and Kate Middleton in London with viewership soaring to all-time high after 9/11 attack, Laden's handiwork. Bin Laden was killed by US troops in a midnight attack at a safe house in Pakistan's Ab

bottabad district on Sunday night, an event that caught the immediate attention of television viewers world over.

In India, about 42.6 million people watched the news related to killing of Osama on TV, meaning higher viewer-ship than royal wedding and IPL-4.

Around 42.1 million people had turned on their idiot boxes to watch the royal wedding last Friday whereas the average IPL viewer-ship has ranged between 25 and 30 million last weekend.

"English, Hindi and international news channels covered this big news (Bin Ladens' killing) all through Monday making it the biggest television event in recent past," said Jiniti Shah, vice-president of television audience rating company, aMAP (Audience Measurement and Analytics).

In this too, Hindi news channels, grabbed more eyeballs than English ones. Market share of Hindi news channels increased by 35 % soon after news of Osama's death was aired as compared to 21 % gain for the English news channels. Among English channels, the international news channels had reasonably higher audience.

Besides there was a variety of things offered to the audience on Monday on the incident, which included news report about Osama's death, to documentaries about his life and his terror profile. 

Osama's death turned out to be the biggest television draw in US after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 with over 55 million watching the news on television at 11 pm on Sunday, television rating company Neilson reported.

Around 70 million people had watched 9/11 attacks on television channels in the US.

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