MUMBAI: Television rating agency Broadcast Audience Research Council India (BARC) has set itself a target of expanding its meter homes up to 44,000 by the end of the ongoing financial year, up from the current 33,000.
“When we first started measuring TV viewership habits, 30% of our sample TV homes were in rural India. This went up to 33% when we expanded our meters to 33,000. This will further go up to 38% when we expand the meter homes to 44,000 by end of this financial year. This is a 153% growth in the rural sample, BARC India CEO Partho Dasgupta told PTI.
Sports has contributed to 3% of the TV viewership this year. With rural areas also finding more takers, Kabaddi has seen a whopping growth of 83% despite cricket continuing to be the most popular sport to be watched on television. The presence of HD channels have helped in this regard as well, as its consumption has seen a 5.5 times growth from 2015-2018.
BARC recently started measuring OOH television consumption and he said its aim is to measure all the screens being used to consume content. During the IPL 2018, it began this trend in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru for restaurants, pubs and lounges.
Dasgupta also revealed that BARC will be looking to take the help of the Return Path Data (RPD) technology for the first time to understand consumer behaviour using viewership data from set top boxes and the collaboration of DTH and MSO platform owners, something which has already been adopted by countries in South East Asia, USA, Canada and UK.
He also opined that RPD will help in fighting panel home tampering, an issue which in India has seen many cases being filed and people being arrested, despite the BARC setting up a Disciplinary Council headed by the reputed Justice Mukul Mudgal to increase transparency in the measurement system.
“With return path data (RPD), we plan to scale up this number to over 200,000,” he told the newswire.
Dasgupta said that while the likes of DEN Networks and Airtel Digital TV have come on board for RPD, BARC is negotiating with other media players for the same.
The agency claims that 557 million people in India watch television daily and the average time spent per viewer doing the same is 3 hours and 44 minutes.
Since 2015, it is the youth aged from 15-30 that are driving TV consumption, as viewership has increased to 28.3 billion impressions, up by 39% during this period, .
Through its plans, it is evident that BARC India wishes to become an insights firm and not just merely producing data, launching new products and services for its subscribers, according to Dasgupta.
Dasgupta also spoke about BARC starting its digital measurement service Ekam, going beyond the realms of television.
“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 on board 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 concluded.
