Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC India) reported an overall spike in viewership for Week 36 (September 2–8, 2017) over the course of one year. The TV Viewership Measurement Company saw 726 million unique viewers in the same time frame against 620 million unique million viewers in Week 36, 2016.

The average time spent on television also saw an increase from 3 hours 25 minutes 56 seconds in Week 36, 2016 to 3 hours 37 minutes 39 seconds in 2017.

It also must be noted that BARC stopped reporting on analogue TV homes’ data from July 1, 2017 with the exception of one state and was looking to add homes with new boxes to augment data collection to assist the country’s rapid pace towards digitisation.

This year also saw BARC updating the universe for the first time after its launch in March 2015. The newly updated universe, applicable in the data churned out from Week 8, mapped the viewership from February 18–24, 2017. That week witnessed a significant increase of 18% in Total TV viewership in the country. Total TV impressions had grown from 22.7 billion in week 7 to 26.7 billion impressions in week 8.

The study also highlighted the fact that TV households have grown faster in NCCS B and C, thus increasing the share of the middle class. While NCCS A had dropped from 22% to 21%, NCCS B and C have gone up from 24% to 27% and 31% to 32%, respectively. NCCS D/E on the other hand has de-grown from 23% to 20%. These trends were in line with fragmentation of family sizes (leading to lower average family sizes) and rising economic growth and rising prosperity. It also shows that India has more nuclear families without elders than ever before and it’s also the dominant family group among TV owning homes
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BARC currently has 20,000 bar-o-meters which will go up to 30,000 by the end of 2017.

With the above data it’s safe to presume that television is still an important means of entertainment for majority of India.