New Delhi: In major development to the issues raised by tvnews4u.com in May 2017 on the Broadcasters resorting to illegal means of gaining viewership though Landing page deals between Channels and MSO, the Information & Broadcasting ministry has directed BARC India to stop generating ratings of TV channels that use landing page dealswith various MSOs across the country to spike up its viewership by means of artificially hyped or forced sampling towards their channels.
The ministry in its letter to BARC India has noted that use of landing page is a violation of the provisions of extant interconnection regulations of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
The ministry also asked BARC India to stop generating ratings of channels that do not adhere to TRAI’s regulations.
However, use of landing page deal is a most commonly prevailing practice among the broadcasters, both GECs and News Channels and many of the leading Broadcast networks have used this means in the past and are also using it in the present to boost up its viewership through some kind of artificial means.
On the other hand it is understood that BARC India’s existing watermarking technology has no system to identify the use of Landing page or Dual feed and it can only register viewership irrespective of the number of feeds being used by the broadcaster.
However, BARC India can use the third party data agencies that are monitoring the Dual LCN, which can provide the report on distribution practices adopted by various broadcasters to trace the violating channels and block their ratings as mandated by I&B Ministry.
