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Shuttler PV Sindhu’s badminton final match against Spain's Carolina Marin at the Rio Olympics had garnered 66.5 million viewers in India.
This is the highest viewership in the country for a single match this Olympics, outdoing the viewership of even popular weekend Hindi GEC shows like The Kapil Sharma Show which sees an average of 50 million viewers an episode, according to media research firm Zapr.
According to the firm, Sindhu’s final match saw a whopping rise in viewership — from 16.4 million to 38 million viewers, who watched the live telecast.
The 21-year-old badminton player commanded a highly loyal audience from her win at the semi-finals: 57.4 per cent of people who watched her in the semis came back to watch her at the finals.
Apart from these loyal viewers, double the number of viewers tuned in to watch the final showdown.
Sindhu also received strong support from her home city – Hyderabad, which witnessed the second highest viewership among metropolitan cities in India, after Mumbai.
Meanwhile as per Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) rating, the Rio Olympics had nearly 228 million impressions on nine TV channels during the two weeks of the games.
Impressions typically are referred to the number of individuals in thousands of a target audience who viewed an event, averaged across minutes.
Top 10 sports events (basis sum of normalised impressions across 30 min) were athletics with 63.3 million impressions, Women's Badminton —India vs Spain — Final (PV Sindhu) 54.4 million impressions, badminton 22.3 million impressions and wrestling with 15.3 million impressions.
Top events BARC data also said that swimming, archery, badminton and men’s hockey (India Vs Canada) were top sports watched live with 30.8 million, 24.2 million, 9.3 million and 9.1 million impressions respectively in the first week.
India had sent the largest-ever squad to an Olympics with 117 participants. PV Sindhu and Sakshi Mallik were the only two sportspersons who returned with medals as against six during the London Olympics in 2012.
The feeds provided by the International Olympic Committee were shared by Star India with Doordarshan. Star Sports, was the official broadcaster of the 2016 Olympic Games for the Indian subcontinent.
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