This is bad news. Adspend on linear television, or the TV we get through cable or direct-to-home (DTH), has been falling steadily. From ₹31,200 crore in 2023, it was down to ₹26,300 crore in 2025. So far, however, the lack of ratings, the metric used to buy and sell ad seconds, hasn’t had much impact, according to TAM Media Research, which, among other things, monitors advertising on over 650 TV channels.
Much of the adspend in July must have been planned earlier. That explains why it has held steady. The festive season begins in August with Ganpati and Rakhi, going into Diwali later in the year. Adspends peak at that time. If the data blackout continues, many advertisers will rethink their TV spends. The implications differ for different broadcasters. The larger players will manage. Advertisers will go by historical viewership shares of, say, JioStar, Zee or Sony, much like they do in print, which has been operating without readership data since 2019. It is the small, niche brands, especially in languages or smaller geographies, that will suffer.
Why has it come to this? The intent of the new policy is good. It makes it easier for other firms to get into the ratings field. It mandates a minimum sample of 80,000 meters that should keep rising by 10,000 every year, taking it to 120,000 — that is roughly 550,000 people. BARC operates 58,000 meters, reaching under half as many people currently. The other asks? That 33 per cent of the board members of any rating agency should be independent; the establishment survey, the basis on which a sample is chosen, should be done every three years; and technology-neutral ratings to capture growth across linear and digital. BARC has nine months from the date of registration (renewal) to become compliant with some of the changes.
You could argue, as this column has earlier, that ratings or any metric used in a private industry is a matter between the buyer and the seller. Why should the regulator or the government get into it? That argument flew out of the window more than 15 years ago when the first regulatory interventions in TAM’s ratings began. Many legal battles, consultancy papers and squabbles preceded the phasing out of TAM’s ratings and the rather difficult birth of BARC in 2015. It is a 60:20:20 joint venture between the Indian Broadcasting and Digital Foundation (IBDF), the Indian Society of Advertisers, and the Advertising Agencies Association of India.
BARC faced the same issues as TAM. The sample is robust enough for entertainment, which is more than 50 per cent of all television viewed. But it becomes statistically unstable for small or niche genres. In spite of several advisories requesting broadcasters of niche genres, especially in news and English language programming, to look at trend data on a quarterly basis, they continued to look for how many people were watching one anchor or a show on, say, a Monday night. That kind of granular drilling throws up weird results raising doubts about the quality of the data. The way out was a larger sample. Every new meter costs ₹10,000. An additional 60,000 new meters under the new guidelines mean ₹60 crore. The IBDF, say insiders, is not too keen on investing on a medium in decline.
And that is the first point to consider. In 2019, over 210 million Indian homes had a television set — an audience size of almost 900 million. Thanks to the pandemic and streaming, this is down to 157 million homes, reaching 659 million people in 2025. It has fallen further. However, since BARC has been flogging the same reach numbers since 2018, when the last establishment survey was done, nobody knows (or wants to know) how bad things are. The real growth in TV-like video consumption is coming from DD Free Dish, a state-controlled free DTH service, and connected TVs, which now reach over 50 million homes. Much of what is watched in CTV homes is linear programming. Add CTV homes to the linear number and the TV universe looks good.
That brings this to the second point. Why is cross-media audience measurement such a challenge, especially since most large broadcasters also have successful OTTs — JioStar has JioHotstar, Sony has SonyLIV and so on? The estimate for rolling out a mechanism to measure viewership across DTH, cable or internet is ₹150 crore. Who will pay for it?
And that brings this to the most puzzling thing of all. Advertisers, who actually spend the money on TV have been silent. By all accounts, they have not demanded more from BARC nor questioned it. Many of the changes that the regulator is demanding should have come from advertisers.
What now? There is some talk of giving BARC provisional registration in the interests of continuity. Meanwhile, no firm has shown any interest in setting up a rating agency in India. That is not surprising given the mess the current one seems to be in.
It has been 35 years since India liberalised and the first few private TV channels — CNN, Star TV, Sun TV, Zee — began airing. It has been 22 years since broadcasting had its own regulator — the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. But there is a tiring familiarity to the regulatory playbook. As the TV business heads towards its transformation from linear to digital, it would be nice to begin this new phase with a collaborative playbook.
 "TV, television channel, Free to air, FTA")