I am forced to watch some of these programs like Indian Idol, Nach Baliye etc. The TV gets hogged during these shows at home.
Yesterday, there was the finals of Indian Idol 3 program on Sony TV and we were all watching the show. The anchor said that people of India were voting to chose the winner of the contest. What surprised me was when he said that they had received more than 7 crore (70 million) SMS votes. First reaction would be - WOW.
But then, if you put your thinking caps on, what occurs is -
In a country of 100 crore, 70% leave in villages. So I don't think that they would vote.
That leaves 30 crore people to vote.
Of this 30 crore, I guess the whole of TN, Kerala and many of the other south Indian states would not be watching Hindi channels.
So, we can reduce another 5 crore of the urban crowd.
That leaves only 25 crore people to vote
Assume that most of the people from other states, would like to watch Tele serials in Hindi and their local language. And also assuming that there are many poeple who would watch other music, sports etc channels, I can conveniently reduce the audience watching sony TV to less than 10 crore - I find this number to be very big too ( Unfortunately, I don't have any live statistics or any TPC numbers - all these numbers are arrived by me by some guess and logic).
Now there are other similar programs (song and dance competition) on STAR TV and other channels which are telecast at the same time. These programs attract good number of audience as well.
Many of the remaining viewers are students on prepaid and other middle class folks with a lot of them on life time free incoming scheme (this scheme doesn't have any messaging or outgoing facility).
Now the voting crowd (in my opinion) is definitely reduced to less than 7 crore (which is the number of votes received). Now think, how many people out of this lot would have cell phones.
With the SMS charges to these programs costing between Rs 3 - 5, how many people would send SMS to make someone win a contest. Even if we go by the logic that some people (5 percent of voting crowd) vote multiple times, 7 crore votes can't be reached.
I think, the numbers are just built up by the TV channels to generate curiosity amongst the audience. 7 crore votes NO CHANCE.
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3 comments:
I believe its true that Indian Idol 3 would have received 7 crore votes for sure... Infact I was expecting a little more...
You should have seen the frenzy in shillong and all meghalaya where government had sponsored telephone booths for voting and also ppl from government offices where using the office phones non-stop for an entire week. The same was in Nepal, Sikkim and Darjeeling for Prashant... People get completely fanatic at such times and even state governments become part of the madness!! And... what better for TV channels than to make some more money!!
I agree with Saptarshi!!!
I think a considerable number of votes came from Nepalese all around the world...
you forgot to consider indians living abroad, fans sending multiple SMSs... religious level fantism of Napalese and Asamese fans... it all adds up to &+ crore
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