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New standards coming for viewership ratings

Nithya Subramanian

NEW DELHI, Jan. 20

INDIAN Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) has decided to come out with a set of uniform technical standards for calculating viewership ratings.

Market research agencies providing such data would then have to mandatorily conform to these parameters set by the industry body.

Towards this end, the foundation recently set up a separate committee comprising big broadcasters such as Star, Sony, Zee and Doordarshan to look into the existing viewership rating system and come up with a new framework.

Currently, AC Nielsen and ORG Marg are the two market research agencies providing data on television ratings, popularly known as TAM and INTAM ratings respectively.

But the parameters used by the two are different. ``The two rating agencies cover different number of cities and each tracks different profile of people,'' Mr Bhuvan Lall, Executive Director, IBF, said.

IBF will standardise the basic requirements to minimise conflicting data, he added.

Senior admen said that audience ratings were used by extensively both ad agencies to make advertising decisions and the broadcasters to place their programmes.

``Advertisers look at TRPs to make their media decisions. Currently, each agency relies on data from either one of the two agencies. But, if the basic parameters are laid out, the result may not be so skewed,'' a senior media planner said.

The final regulations are expected to come out in the next few months.

``We will have to wait for the guidelines and we hope that it is not skewed towards the broadcasting industry,'' he said.

Since the industry is unregulated without any industry body to lay parameters, initially, the research agencies came out with their own parameters.

Later, big broadcasters such as Doordarshan, Star, the Association of Advertising Agencies of India (3As of I) and other groups asked AC Nielsen to work out the technical standards and suggested their ratings as the industry standard.

But after the setting up of IBF, the industry body has decided to start work afresh.

IBF is in the process of ironing out the differences between the various business interests associated with the entertainment sector.

It has already signed an agreement with the 3As of I for a policy on credit to the entertainment sector.