The ministry of information and broadcasting has asked television monitoring agency BARC or Broadcast Audience Research Council to share raw-level data with broadcasters.
“BARC has requested this ministry for being permitted to share audience measurement Raw Level Data (RLD) with broadcasters. ln this regard, BARC has apprised that it has significantly scaled up the panel homes by about 85% (from 30,000 to 55,000). Further, RLD data has been sufficiently masked and anonymized and does not include personally identifiable information of panels thereby ensuring the secrecy, privacy and integrity of the panel homes,” the ministry has said in a letter.
Further, while BARC has conveyed that they are already sharing the RLD data with advertisers and media agencies, the Policy Guidelines for Television Rating Agencies in lndia issued in 2014 prescribes that such data be made available to all interested stakeholders in a transparent and equitable manner, the letter added.
In January 2022, the I&B ministry had asked BARC to release viewership ratings of news channels with immediate effect. The agency was to release data for the genre for the past three months, in a monthly format, with the revised system requiring the reporting of news and niche genres to be carried out on a four-week rolling average concept.
Ratings were suspended in October 2020 following allegations that they were rigged by a clutch of TV channels. BARC had said it was pausing the publication of weekly data for news to review and augment the current standards of measurement and reporting data. The exercise would take 8-12 weeks, it had said then.
TRP manipulation surfaced when Mumbai police said it had busted a racket based on complaints received from Barc India and Hansa, a consumer insights company and one of the vendors of Barc, about “suspicious trends“ and activities. Certain households were paid to keep their television sets switched on, irrespective of whether they were at home, in order to increase the viewership of some news channels, they had said, naming Arnab Goswami’s Republic TV and two other Marathi channels.
BARC had undertaken revision in its processes, protocols and oversight mechanism and initiated changes in the governance structure, following recommendations of the TRP committee constituted in November 2020 in the wake of the alleged ratings scam, as well as those of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), the ministry had said.
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Updated: 23 Aug 2023, 07:26 PM IST
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