BENGALURU: And so the dingdong contest in viewership ratings between pubcaster network Doordarshan’s English news channel DD India and ARG Outlier Asianet News Network’s Arnab Goswami led Republic TV continues. As mentioned by us earlier since week 14 of 2019 the battle has been on when DD India held first rank and Republic TV held second rank respectively in Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) weekly list of top 5 English news channels. The order changed, with Republic TV in the lead, in week 15 of 2019 and DD India at second rank, only to change once again in week 16, with the former placed second and the latter placed first per BARC’s weekly viewership data.
Week 19 of 2019 (Saturday, 4 May 2019 to Friday, 10 May 2019, week or period under review) is the sixth week in a row that these two English news channels have swapped the first two ranks alternately with each other in BARC’s weekly lists of top 5 channels of their genre. Also, as a matter of fact, except for DD India, the other four channels in BARC’s weekly lists gained viewership. Only Times Network’s Times Now retained its previous week’s third rank in week 19 of 2019, ranks four and five were swapped by the previous week’s respective holders during the period under review.
Let’s see how the top 5 English news channels performed in week 19 of 2019.
Republic TV was ranked first with 0.599 million weekly impressions as compared second rank and 0.596 million weekly impressions in week 18. DD India was ranked second with 0.522 million weekly impressions as compared to first rank and 0.655 million weekly impressions in week 18
At third rank in week 19 of 2019 was Times Now with 0.448 million weekly impressions as compared to 0.443 million weekly impressions in week 18. At fourth rank in week 19 of 2019 was CNN News18 with 0.301 million weekly impressions as compared to second rank and 0.281 million weekly impressions in week 18. At fifth rank was India Today Television with 0.293 million weekly impressions as compared to 0.283 million weekly impressions in the previous week.