Take hockey to wider audience

We Indians are delighted to have World Cup on our soils, and it comes after 27 years. Welcome World Cup 2010. It is felt the mega event will rekindle the passion the country has for the field sport.

It is worthwhile to go to Delhi, in case you are not the resident of the city — which almost 90 percent of Indian population are — and watch the matches as they takes place. However, neither whole India can have a Chalo Delhi mood nor if it happens Delhi can accommodate everyone of them. It is obvious the television, therefore, is key for revitalizing Indian hockey if that is the objective of the FIH which offered the World Cup to India in the first place.

Here only I feel whether the biggest telecaster of the country or some special channel can do the job better, and take the action to living rooms of more people.

Hockey is the common man’s sport; the ‘Aam Aadmi’ is the avid viewer. They live in rural semi-urban and rurallareas. Therefore the organizers’ effort should be to reach wider audience rather than just metro based elites.

Let’s cast emotions aside and take a look at the numbers and the bigger picture of keeping the game alive in India.

Doordarshan: The terrestrial signals of DD can reach 89.6 percent of the country’s 1 billion people
– 119 million homes in India have a TV set.
– Total viewer ship at 415 million people is amongst the highest in the world

Ten Sports (The officials telecaster of the 2010 World Cup)
Ten Sports is the most watched sports channel by far across the sub-continent. Recent viewing data shows that the channel enjoys over 50% share of viewing of sports channels in India and the pattern is repeated across the region.

The hockey lovers in India traditionally live in rural areas. Jharkhand, Bihar, Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu are but few states as an example who have access to Doordararshan than 1Sports.

I feel, as happens in cricket, which is telecasting international matches on two channels, one in their preferred ones the other on National Channel, the hockey should also be shown on two channels if it really wants to reach real and more audience and also to genuinely market its potential.