Mumbai: TV audience measurement agency, Broadcast Audience Research Council India (BARC) plans to expand its meter homes to 44000 by this financial year.
PTI reports quotes BARC India’s CEO Partho Dasgupta stating that BARC India currently has 33,000 sample TV homes in its measurement universe which will expand to 44000 by end of this financial year nd further go up to 55000 in the coming years.
In addition to its plans to expand the meters, BARC is also working towards harvesting Return-Path-Data (RPD). The report quotes Dasgupta stating that they have tied up with DEN Networks and Airtel Digital TV for tapping the RPD from the subscribers of the respective distribution platforms and are in talks with all the other players.
While briefing on BARC India’s expanding reach in measuring Rural India – Partho Das Gupta said, “When we first started measuring TV viewership habits, 30 percent of our sample TV homes were in rural India. This went up to 33 percent when we expanded our meters to 33,000. This will further go up to 38 percent, when we expand the meter homes to 44,000 by end of this financial year. This is a 153 percent growth in the rural sample. With return path data (RPD), we plan to scale up this number to over 200,000,” he said adding that RPD will help to curb panel home tampering.”
“Also, trends like increase in temperature leads to drop in primetime viewership and total TV viewership in South spikes during festival holidays have come up,” Dasgupta said.
This year, BARC India also plans to move from being a mere data company to an insights company with the launch of new products and services for subscribers.
On the delay in the roll-out of its digital measurement EKAM, Partho said, “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 onboard 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.”
The daily tune-ins on TV currently stands at 557 million and the daily average time spent per viewer watching TV is 3 hour 44 minutes. The total TV viewership has gone up from 20.4 billion impressions to 28.3 billion impressions, up by 39 percent. Key Hindi genres like Hindi GEC, Hindi movies, and Hindi news have gone up by 6 percent, 87 percent and 13 percent respectively since 2015.
BARC recently started measuring OOH TV consumption in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru for Restaurants, Pubs, Lounges.
Viewership for English channels has also gone up from 115 million impressions to 122 million impressions, a growth of 6 percent. HD Viewership has seen a 5.5 times growth in the last three years. Sports that in 2015 contributed to 1.8 per cent to total TV viewership, has grown to 3 percent in 2018. In the sports genre, while cricket still remains the most popular on TV, viewership of local sport kabaddi has grown by 83 percent.
