STAR Movies gets high ratings

STAR Movies is concentrating on blockbuster hits to get it high ratings. First, it was the Oscars. According to TAM figures, for the last week of March, when it was telecast, and for a C&S audience of SEC AB in the four-plus age group, the Oscars brought the channel high ratings of 3.08.

This made it the highest rated Hollywood event. After this, the Jurassic Park series have brought the channel another run of high ratings. For example, on March 29 its rating was at 3.75, the highest for any English movie in the last two years. Titanic, telecast on December 31, 1999, on STAR Movies, was the only film, other than Jurassic Park, with higher ratings.

The sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, telecast on April 12, recorded another high. With rating of 3.73, it was the second highest rated English movie in India, in the last two years. This movie reached 1,843,000 individuals, according to TAM figures for a base of C&S audiences belonging to SEC AB, and over the age of four years for a panel compromising nine cities.

The channel, in the hope of high ratings, has a set of Hollywood hits lined up. The next few months will showcase movies like Me, Myself & Irene, which will be telecast in May; X-Men and Meet the Parents in June; Bedazzled and Cast Away are slated for July. Also in June, the channel will telecast all the five Rocky movies in the series titled King of the Ring, and in July, another series Monsoon Passion, with movies of Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage.

However, such high ratings tend to reflect the popularity of each individual movie rather than the popularity of the channel itself. A look at TAM figures, across all audiences for STAR Movies, shows erratic jumps. To take on example, in the second week of the year, HBO had top rating, with The Mummy. On the other hand, for the week before the Jurassic Park adventures were telecast, the TVR ratings for STAR Movies had barely touched 2. Significantly, none of the other English movie channels - AXN, HBO, and Zee English - have been able to notch up such high ratings.

Media analysts feel one reason for this is that with the English audience, the variations are immense. And the patterns keep shifting according to the programming mixes. For example, according to industry estimate, when AXN came into the country in 1998, the English-viewing audience had a break up of roughly 70:30 in favour of the male viewer. By mid-2001, this equation had changed to 56:44 (males versus females), quite close to the international AXN audience of 55:45 (males versus females).

Much of this can be attributed to the broadening of its audience by including such movies as Far and Away in its programming mix. On the other hand, STAR has followed a strategy of trying to telecast the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood, irrespective of a target or a specific audience segment. While the high ratings of Jurrasic Park, and The Lost World reflect this, they also reflect the fact that STAR Movies, without its blockbusters, is more or less on par with the other channels. © 2002 agencyfaqs!