New Delhi: Riding on the popularity of the ongoing 10th season of the T20 cricket tournament Indian Premiere League (IPL), television broadcaster Sony Max (also the official broadcaster of IPL) became the most-watched television channel across genres during the second week of IPL.

Sony Max recorded 1,429.5 million impressions between 8 April and 14 April (week 15 of 2017), surpassing the Tamil-language general entertainment channel Sun TV which has ruled the television charts for the first 14 weeks of 2017, according to data released on Thursday by television viewership measurement agency Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India.

Sun TV garnered 1,247.5 million impressions during the week. Impressions, also known as television viewership in thousands (TVT), refer to the number of individuals in thousands of a target audience who viewed an event, averaged across minutes.

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The official broadcasters for IPL matches are Sony Max, Sony Six (high definition and standard definition) and Sony ESPN (high definition and standard definition).

The ten matches played during the week garnered 231.3 million impressions across five channels— Sony Max, Sony Six, Sony Six HD, Sony ESPN and Sony ESPN HD.On an average, the ten matches recorded 23.1 impressions, a 34% jump from the year-ago period.

The match between Sunrisers Hyderabad and Mumbai Indians played on 12 April recorded highest viewership of 29.5 million impressions, followed by the match played on 9 April between Kolkata Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians.

To be sure, the jump in viewership can somewhat be attributed to the recent expansion of Barc’s measurement universe. Barc India had recently updated and aligned its TV universe in line with ground level changes in demographics, TV ownership and connection type among other things. After the update in March 2017, total television households in the country rose to 183 million from 154 million in 2013.

“The growth in viewership maybe because of the improved accuracy of Barc measurement. Maybe people were watching it before but we were not measuring it correctly. Now, with the expanded universe, there is a more accurate measure. However, IPL is a very strong property and is one of the few properties that touches across all age groups. It is not a surprise that a property like IPL continues to do better and better," said Ashish Bhasin, chairman and chief executive, Dentsu Aegis Network South Asia.

The overall ad expenditure on sports events grew 24.63% to Rs3,510.8 crore in 2016, according to report titled Sporting Nation in the Making IV, jointly published by GroupM ESP, the sports and entertainment arm of GroupM and SportzPower, a sports business news company. Total sports sponsorship saw a growth of 19.33% in 2016.

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