BARC initiates process for new TV ratings measurement
BARC has issued RFI to understand state-of-the-art in the TAMR
The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has taken first major step in the direction of building a more robust TV ratings measurement system. BARC has issued a global Request for Information (RFI) to seek understanding of the state-of-the art in the area of Television Audience Measurement Research (TAMR) in particular and Audience Measurement Research (AMR) in more general terms.
This RFI seeks ideas, templates, experiences, that will help BARC to blueprint the new television audience measurement system. The responses have to be submitted to BARC by February 5.
Punit Goenka, chairman BARC and MD & CEO, ZEE, said, "BARC is committed to building a Television Audience Measurement System that becomes ipso facto the Gold Standard in its class worldwide. Given that BARC addresses a population of over 1 Billion, of which over 0.6 Billion have access to television in some form, I am confident that BARC will settle for nothing less than being the best.”
Shashi Sinha, Chairman-TechComm, BARC and CEO-Lodestar UM & CEO-IPG Mediabrands India stated, “At various times, more than one vendor has attempted to provide audience measurement but from 2002, TAM Media Research, India- a joint venture of Nielsen and Kantar, has been the de facto provider of the measurement currency, being widely used by all three stakeholder constituencies for all commercial and marketing decision making. It is clear that legacy architecture of the system, that has evolved incrementally, is now ready for seminal change. However, what is not clear is the contours of the new system, which BARC aims to define.”
Television audience measurement in India has been around for nearly three decades.
Beginning with a simple diary based system in the early 1980s covering Doordarshan, then the state-owned monopoly broadcaster, it evolved parallel to the evolution of the Indian television market. By the mid-1990s, it was already covering satellite television and in the early part of this century, India was one of the earliest television markets to have a pure Peoplemeter based system.
The challenges for an audience measurement system in an era of digital delivery of television channels brings in its wake a massive expansion in choice of content coupled with accelerating adoption of new technologies that are shifting consumption away from the fixed time chart (FTC); and shifting it to personal digital appliances are altogether different from the era when television meant living rooms, common choices and shared family experience.
BARC said it understands that a good system rests as much on a sound understanding of the footprint of the medium: the Establishment Study; as it does on continuous tracking of viewing behaviour: the Television Meter Panel.
BARC is also aware of a number of technologies at varying stages of development that promise non-intrusive or minimally intrusive viewership measurement. BARC is also aware of developments in the area of integrated media consumption metrics, e.g. IPA's Touchpoints 4 exercise scheduled for next year.
All these are of interest to the architecture of the future system in India. BARC expects respondents to incorporate their own experiences in these areas as items of emphasis in the response to this RFI, BARC said.