Broadcast body for more transparency

On day two of the NDTV-Nielsen lawsuit drama, the industry, broadcasters and advertisers stressed on the need for improving the ratings system. And, once again, the subject of Broadcast Audience Research Council, an audience measurement system promoted around six months ago by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation to bring transparency into the system, was brought up.

Uday Shankar, president of IBF and chief executive of STAR India, emphasised the “very, very urgent need to get IBF’s council up and running”, against the backdrop of the NDTV lawsuit.

A similar television ratings dispute more than 10 years ago had led to the merger of two audience measurement systems, Nielsen’s TAM and ORG-MARG’s InTAM (Indian television audience measurement). “With two rating systems in place, the industry was split on which data to follow. Each player used data that suited it better. A single-rating system meant uniformity,” says Ashish Bhasin, chairman (India) and chief executive officer (Southeast Asia), Aegis Media.

However, Sunil Lulla, managing director and chief executive, Times Television Network, says a single or a multiple rating system is not a concern, as long as there is transparency in the system.

Puneet Goenka, managing director and chief executive of Zee Entertainment Enterprises and treasurer IBF, says, in India, a single agency does the end-to-end ratings work, something IBF’s council is expected to do away with. Under it, different agencies would carry out different functions.

For TAM, the industry had disapproved of the sample size. Here’s why: Households with television sets in India grew exponentially — from 60 million in 2005 to 130 million in 2012. But TAM’s sample size rose from about 5,000 to only about 8,150 through the period.

“About 8,000 homes are expected to represent viewership patterns of a nation with a population of a billion. Of these, how many could possibly be watching niche genres like English news or entertainment channels?” asks a television head.

Barc is ambitious in its aim of doing away with this issue. It aims to carry out at least 5,00,000 interviews across the country and cover at least 22,000 households in the metering system.