By Shailesh Kapoor
If you entered the Indian television industry about two-three decades ago, the two words that would be drilled into your sub-conscious within a week were: Appointment Viewing (or Appointment Viewership, in a later variant). Appointment was the Holy Grail of television. It was the ability of a TV show to get a certain guaranteed mass of audience every day or week, depending on its telecast frequency.
Everyone wanted their channels to be watched by appointment. Even movie channels and niche channels, which had no intrinsic merit to demand appointment from their audience, chased the idea. What else explains an assembly line of “DDT” (Day-Date-Time) promos for movie re-reruns, at all the major movie channels?
Even at a channel like Zoom, for which I headed the marketing function in its launch period, there was significant on-air inventory spent on getting viewers to watch by appointment. In hindsight, one was chasing the unattainable, but such was the buzz value of the term back then, that it even found a mention in KRAs (even though there is no evident way of measuring what proportion of a show’s viewership is by appointment).
The term Appointment has lost some of that buzz value in the last decade. “Habit” is what is understood to drive non-GEC consumption in primetime, and all consumption in non-prime time. The habit of watching news at 10pm, for example. Or the habit of turning on a kids channel to watch a cartoon programme after coming back from school. Habit is a less ambitious variant of appointment, and does not have the brand loyalty aspect attached to it. Watching a movie on TV every evening for an hour (habit) is different from watching a particular movie channel every evening for an hour (appointment).
With the advent of OTT platforms, appointment has become increasingly elusive, especially for men, and younger (unmarried) women. Being pinned down at a particular time for a particular show is no longer required, because catch-up television is available. That not too many TV shows are appointment-worthy to begin with doesn’t help matters.
Except marquee sports events and a select few TV serials for married women, rest of Indian television viewing is now functioning on habit. Watching Star Plus from 8-10pm could be a daily habit for a family, but it doesn’t carry the same stakes as appointment. They would gladly trade it off for an IPL game, a new show like KBC, or some important news on a particular day. Stories of wars over the remote control in Indian families are things of the past, because Appointment Viewing is a thing of the past too.
The habit of watching TV makes the medium secure, because this habit is linked to the grand Indian institution: Family. But in the absence of appointment, it makes channel brands and shows vulnerable, and their success more fickle, less enduring.
Studying habit, instead of chasing appointment, should then be the new mantra for the many, many television executives who have viewership KRAs.