Television advertising revenues have been in freefall, declining from Rs 334 billion to Rs 294 billion in just two years. Twelve per cent of the brands that used TV to reach the masses in 2023 adopted a different distribution medium in 2024. Despite this, the TV industry continues to expand its offerings. DD Free Dish, a state-run distribution platform that requires only a one-time installation fee and no subscription charges, added both consumers and channels last year. The number of Free-to-Air channels on TV that recover costs from advertising is also increasing. Clearly, there is a disconnect between broadcasters’ and advertisers’ assessment of the true value of India’s 160 million-household-strong TV market.
At the heart of this mismatch is a measurement gap that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) is now trying to resolve through reforms to TV ratings guidelines. The MIB is in the process of amending the 2014 television ratings guidelines that led to the accreditation of the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) to measure the relative popularity of TV channels. This much-needed proposal aims to end BARC’s monopoly and allow additional entities to conduct TV ratings, which can revitalise TV advertising.
History of TV ratings
Before BARC, TAM (Television Audience Measurement)—a joint media research venture by Kantar and Nielsen—tracked what India watched. But India is a large country, and TAM could only place meters to measure audience preferences in a limited number of households, that too mostly in urban areas. As a solution, broadcasters, advertisers, and media agencies came together in 2010 to form BARC, which was empanelled by the MIB and started operations in 2015. BARC roped in TAM for back-end technological expertise and rejigged sampling methods. When BARC was rolled out, it measured 12,000 out of the 145 million TV households in India. This was still only 0.008 per cent.
Panel sizes have grown over the years to 55,000, but BARC continues to use the same data-collection methods. Watch time is measured in clock minutes through audio-watermarking technology that detects the channel being viewed. Before watching, each family member in a metered household must press a button to indicate whether they are an adult or a child, and to record their gender. They must press the same button again when they stop viewing. This approach rests on the optimistic assumption that viewers comply every time they switch channels.
Meanwhile, the global media landscape has been moving ahead with qualitative, platform-agnostic measurement tools enabled by big data, advanced meter technologies, and more demographically inclusive panels.
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Need for competition in TV ratings
Advertisers rely on BARC’s single measurement currency, Television Rating Point (TRP), which estimates the duration and frequency of viewership. These ratings help them determine which channels attract the most viewers and where to spend their ad budgets. There are no alternative estimates to go by. In contrast, financial institutions can access data from seven credit rating agencies to determine the creditworthiness of a borrower. There are a dozen or more agencies that news channels can commission for exit poll surveys of elections.
A one-agency, one-currency system also leaves TV audience measurement vulnerable to manipulation. The first complaints of TRP manipulation emerged in 2018, when Hansa Research – the entity that installs meters for audience measurement – filed a police complaint alleging that households were being paid to watch a particular channel. Later, in 2020, the TRP scam implicated broadcasters and former officials at BARC, with allegations of manipulation dating back to 2016, according to an audit report that Mumbai Police received from BARC. The council suspended ratings for three months, but the damage had already been done: advertisers had lost trust in the TRP system, and some broadcasters exited BARC.
Other mature media markets have gone through challenges involved in relying on a single entity to track consumer attention across platforms, devices, and demographics, and have therefore transitioned to ‘multi-currency models’ that allow multiple measurement providers to coexist. Ad-industry bodies in the US, such as the Video Advertising Bureau and the Television Bureau of Advertising, encourage alternative measurement providers. Even in Singapore, where the TV market is smaller than those in India and the US, multiple agencies operate.
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Much-needed shot in the arm
A ratings monopoly in India has led to a lack of technological variation, resulting in sluggish systems detached from market dynamics. The rationale for MIB’s latest move is therefore strong, and if advertisers can choose between multiple measurement providers, they will gain access to sharper audience data and become more confident in their fiscal planning. This policy rejig also makes room for multi-stakeholder collaborations between distributors with last-mile reach and specialist measurement companies. The resulting competition will drive improvements in advertisers’ access to quality data. The ministry should allow the players to freely collaborate, and the best measurement models to emerge in the market.
Even as advertising revenue dwindles, TV in India is far from its swan song. This year, 169 million people tuned in to the Indian Premier League final on TV. With mass appeal intact, opening up the ratings ecosystem could engender much-needed trust in TV advertising and give broadcasting a shot in the arm. It could also prove to be a testbed to stress-test India’s growing data analytics capacities, bolstered by the R&D and skills spillovers of global firms setting up global capability centres here.
If done right, this much-needed reform can catalyse the kinds of multiplier impacts free markets tend to regularly deliver in high-technology ecosystems.
Varun Ramdas and Srishti Joshi are media policy specialists at Koan Advisory, New Delhi. These are their personal views.
This article is part of ThePrint-Koan Advisory series that analyses emerging policies, laws and regulations in India’s technology sector. Read all the articles here.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)