In August this year, India’s two ratings bodies – Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) and TAM Media Research – merged to create a single entity with measurement meters covering roughly 136,000 of the 800 million Indians watching TV.

Other than helping BARC to meet its commitment to cover 50,000 homes by 2018, what does the coming together of its two rating bodies mean for India’s US$7.5 billion TV industry?

The 51:49 joint venture, temporarily named The Meter Company, pools BARC’s 22,000 meters with TAM’s 12,000. These 34,000 meters will now form the sample that provides data on what India’s 160 million TV homes are watching.

“The smaller companies will now get a level playing field,” says Rahul Johri, executive vice president and general manager, Discovery Networks, South/Southeast Asia.

He adds that “as a broadcaster in a diverse country, we need robustness and stability in data. There was a lot of fluctuation in the data because of the small sample size especially for small channels. And that had to be eliminated”.

A by product could be that “the incidence of carriage will go down because you can’t buy carriage all over the country now to cover sample homes. How many TRP homes will you buy?”, Johri asks.

The second major impact is that “rural, small towns and premium (programming) categories all come into play (with a larger sample),” says Sudhanshu Vats, group chief executive, Viacom18 Media.

Bibhu Prasad Rath, president/chief executive of Orissa-based Ortel Communications, a regional cable company agrees. “For smaller firms such as ours, more coverage means more meters in small towns and that makes placement in towns we are in attractive,” says Rath.

Why pool?

BARC, a joint venture between three industry bodies was created in response to complaints about TAM, which is owned jointly (50:50) by the US$6.3 billion U.S.-based Nielsen Holdings and the US$17.3 billion U.K.-based marketing services group WPP.

Much of the griping was about its sample size and allegations that meters could be fixed.

However, ever since BARC became operational earlier this year, the question of historical data and that of whether the industry can support two metrics has been up in the air.

“For Nielsen and the other stakeholders it was obvious that two currencies (for TV ratings) is not sustainable. It causes confusion especially if the numbers differ for the same spot. Two TV measurement systems in any country are difficult to manage. Given that, we had to come together,” says Prashant Singh, managing director, Nielsen India.

But if there were issues with TAM’s data before, how does it become usable now?

“The 12,000 (TAM meters) will be redeployed as per BARC’s sampling plan. The raw data is fused with BARC meter data,” says BARC chief executive, Partho Dasgupta. He reckons the data from this large sample will be ready to use by first or second quarter of 2016.
– Vanita Kohli-Khandekar

This article was first published inContentAsia's eNewsletter, 30 November 2015.