MUMBAI: India‘s Hindi general entertainment channels are riding high on Bollywood. Salman Khan aka Chulbul Pandey, the corrupt police officer from Uttar Pradesh, has inched closer to Aamir Khan‘s 3 Idiots in performance on television, recording the second-highest ratings for a Hindi movie in recent times.

Dabangg, the biggest blockbuster of 2010, clocked a 9.2 TVR as Colors added 64 GRPs (gross rating points) from the movie premiere on 28 November. It drew in 35 million viewers in the Hindi speaking market, as per Tam data.

3 Idiots, a more popular film, had clocked a record 10.9 TVR on Sony Entertainment Television.

Dabangg enabled Colors to cross 300 GRPs after a gap of 11 weeks. The Viacom18 channel closed the week ended 4 December with 345 GRPs. The channel, however, remained at its second position as the genre leader Star Plus gained 37 GRPs to end the week with 415 GRPs.
 
Dabangg also raced past popular soaps to become the top-rated show across the GEC space for the week. The closest rival, Saathiya Saath Nibhana, on Star Plus earned 6.4 TVR, a glaring gap that is rare in today‘s highly competitive and fragmented GEC space.
 
 So will Colors be able to sustain the GRP spike?

"Colors has got a huge spike due to the Salman Khan movie. It will, however, be interesting to see what the channel offers in the 9-10 pm slot once Bigg Boss gets over,” says a media observer.Meanwhile, Star Plus‘ growth in the week ended 4 December has come from weekday primetime (+7), weekday others (+3), weekday afternoon (+2), weekend original programming (+22), weekend others (+7), and weekend movies (+13). However, the channel saw a decline in weekend events (-17) as in the previous week, a television award show event had fetched a TVR of 4.

Zee TV (183 GRPs) and Sony Entertainment Television (181 GRPs) slipped by 23 and 20 GRP points respectively. The two channels maintained their third and fourth positions even as the gap between them is narrowing.