BARC India to expand meter homes to 44k by this fiscal

Television rating agency Broadcast Audience Research Council India (BARC) plans to expand its meter homes to 44,000 by this financial year, a top official has said.

"When we first started measuring TV viewership habits, 30 per cent of our sample TV homes were in rural India. This went up to 33 per cent when we expanded our meters to 33,000. This will further go up to 38 per cent, when we expand the meter homes to 44,000 by end of this financial year. This is a 153 per cent growth in the rural sample, BARC India CEO Partho Dasgupta told PTI.

It currently has 33,000 sample TV homes in its measurement universe which will go up to 55,000 in the coming years.

"With return path data (RPD), we plan to scale up this number to over 200,000," he said adding that RPD will help to curb panel home tampering.

BARC has tied up with DEN Networks and Airtel Digital TV for RPD and Dasgupta said they are in talks with all the other players.

The daily tune-ins on TV currently stands at 557 million and the daily average time spent per viewer watching TV is 3 hour 44 minutes.

Since BARC started rolling out its data in 2015, some interesting trends have emerged like contrary to popular perception, TV Viewership is highest among youth (15-30 years) even in the digital age.

The total TV viewership has gone up from 20.4 billion impressions to 28.3 billion impressions, up by 39 per cent.

Key hindi genres like hindi GEC, hindi movies and hindi news have gone up by 6 per cent, 87 per cent and 13 per cent respectively since 2015.

Viewership for english channels has also gone up from 115 million impressions to 122 million impressions, a growth of 6 per cent.

HD Viewership has seen a 5.5 times growth in the last three years. Sports that in 2015 contributed to 1.8 per cent to total TV viewership, has grown to 3 per cent in 2018.

In the sports genre, while cricket still remains the most popular on TV, viewership of local sport kabaddi has grown by 83 per cent.

"Also, trends like increase in temperature leads to drop in primetime viewership and total TV viewership in South spikes during festival holidays have come up," Dasgupta said.

BARC recently started measuring out of home television consumption and he said its aim is to measure all the screens being used to consume content. It has recently started measuring OOH TV consumptions in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru for restaurants,pubs,lounges.

The biggest focus area for BARC India this year will be to move from being a mere data company to an insights company. With new products and services to be launched for subscribers.

It is also preparing for its digital measurement service Ekam. "One reason it is taking longer than estimated to launch Ekam is that we are working to build that consensus to get all key stakeholders onboard and aligned to the building blocks of Ekam. This will ensure all-round acceptance of the data. We also underwent a similar journey before launching TV viewership measurement, he added.