Govt keen for BARC to take final shape
Indiantelevision.com Team
(10 January 2011 10:30 pm)
NEW DELHI: The pressure is building up on India's television rating agencies to widen the sample size, be more representative and expand their coverage area.
The government wants the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) to take final shape and formulate a 'more robust' television audience measurement system.
Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni said Monday the Council, set up earlier this year by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation and the Indian Society of Advertisers, should take note of the recommendations made by the Television Ratings Committee headed by the Ficci Secretary General Amit Mitra.
Soni said the government’s role with regard to television ratings was limited to getting the industry bodies together to work on the report, which was presented to her this morning.
The report provided a roadmap to the I&B Ministry to review the TRP system in the country, Soni added.
She said the primary objective was to ensure transparency and reliability and cover as many people as possible while calculating television ratings.
Soni said there will be no ham-handed approach to the issue and a consensus will have to be evolved. Calculating TRPs had to be driven by the industry.
The basic premise of the Committee is that BARC would be the main body and organisations like Tam and aMAP would function under it for the purpose of ratings.
Indiantelevision.com was the first to report on the key findings of the committee.
Mitra said the number of bodies judging ratings – just two – was too little for a large country like India. The report had suggested that BARC could call for more organisations through auction for this purpose.
Two members, Rajiv Mehrotra from the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and eminent journalist Neerja Chowhury, accompanied Dr Mitra as he presented the 75-page report prepared by the eight-member Committee.
Other members were Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) Director Professor S K Barua, retired Secretary to the Government D S Mathur, and Professor Ashis Sen Gupta of the Indian Statistical Institute of Kolkata, apart from I&B Ministry Joint Secretary (Broadcasting) Arvind Kumar.
The Committee has recommended that BARC should initiate changes within its Board and appoint the High Powered Committee by June 2011.
The Committee has further recommended that if BARC fails to do so, it may invoke Government action through appropriate legislation such as taking over the regulation of TRP measurement either by asking TRAI to step in or by creating other mechanisms.
Mitra said the peoplemeters were very expensive as they were imported, and these should be produced indigenously to lower their price.
He said a country like India which had a ‘rainbow culture’ could not be governed by ratings collected from over 8,000 homes by just two bodies – Tam and aMAP.
He also said to avoid conflict of interest, there should be no cross-holding between the rating agencies, broadcasters, or advertising agencies.
He said the government will also have to examine the fact that while the broadcasting industry depended on licence fee all over the world, here the dependence was almost totally on advertising.
Though TRPs are generated in India in the domain of private sector, the I&B Ministry had requested the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to offer their recommendations concerning TRPs. Following the report of the Trai, the Committee had been set up on 5 May last year.
The Committee members had several round of meetings and discussions with stakeholders and the Rating agencies to get an in-depth understanding of the issues plaguing the current TRP system, before arriving at the recommendations. The committee members also studied the International best practices and regulation to understand the efficacy of various models.
Among other things, the Committee has said broadcasters, advertisers and advertising agencies should pay a certain percentage of their relevant turnovers to BARC on an annual basis to fund the expansion of sample size for TRP measurement. The total cost of expansion of TRP measurement system over 5 years would be around Rs 6.6 billion, which is approximately 0.32 per cent per year of the total TV industry size in India. The committee feels that this level of expenditure should not be very difficult for the industry to meet.
In order to provide a wider coverage of peoplemeters, the Committee has suggested that efforts should be taken by BARC to reduce the manufacturing cost of peoplemeters by exploring innovation and local manufacturing with indigenisation to overcome financial limitations which are hampering the increase in sample size.
The committee recommended that BARC should work in close association with the Industry and aid the development of an indigenous market for the manufacturers by ensuring that rating agencies define the specifications of peoplemeters and guarantee a certain demand.
The committee has recommended that as a long term measure, rating agencies should consider manufacturing/assembling peoplemeters in India itself to bring down the cost.
The committee also took note of the fact that peoplemeters attract 50 per cent import duty which makes them expensive. The committee suggests that as an immediate short term measure reduction in the import duty should be considered.
The rating system should be made compatible with emerging technologies to capture data over different platforms corresponding to penetration levels of respective platforms in TV viewing population, to ensure a holistic picture of the viewers’ preference.
The TRP measurement process should consist of four stages in which the first stage should be designing of survey and quality control research, followed by commissioning and establishment survey. The third stage should be data analysis and report generation followed by Audit. Each one of these stages should be separately commissioned to distinct agencies to achieve unbiased and reliable results.
The Committee has also felt that at present there is a lot of secrecy exercised by the rating agencies in disclosing the data and methodology used through the process of the entire rating measurement.
The Committee has recommended that the guidelines set out in the Trai Report of 2008 on the key eligibility conditions of rating agencies, general operational, ethical and disclosure norms and standards should be followed.
The Committee has also recommended that BARC should set up a Complaint Redressal Mechanism on the lines of the model being followed by Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI).
Tam Responds
Meanwhile, dubbing the committee report "very constructive", Tam said in an official statement that the directions and way forward suggested in the report will only take the Indian media industry to a newer trajectory of growth.
"It is very encouraging to see that the approach and ideologies getting reflected in the Ficci report are the same as what Tam has always believed in – that is helping the industry grow by acting as the central, neutral and technologically advanced Media Research Partner. Tam Media Research is a service that is of the industry, for the industry and by the industry," Tam said.
Tam also claimed that it has already started work towards achieving the peoplemeter sample size proposed by the committee.
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