The television audience measurement agency, however, will complete the installation process by the week-end. In a presentation to its clients on Wednesday, TAM said it would start reporting from 27 cities from July 18.

TAM, which had drawn flak from media users for the delay in its implementation of its national TV ratings service, also announced the release of the latest version of Telescope 7. "The software would improve the speed up to 70 per cent on certain analysis modules and enable a media user to make a multi-city analysis," said Andrew Floyd, managing director, media measurement services, Asia Pacific, AC Nielsen.

TAM Media, a joint venture between AC Nielsen and IMRB, also said that the AdEX (advertising expenditure) service would be expanded from six channels and eightDoordarshan regional telecasts to 44 channels this month.

Though TAM said the signal injection technology was superior to the picture matching system, the TV audience rating agency did not give a deadline as to when it would introduce the solution. Neither did Floyd make a commitment on who would bear the additional equipment costs that puts the broadcasting transmission on the code. "The equipment would cost between $3,000-5,000. We have not yet decided on whether we would absorb the burden or pass it on to the broadcasters and the cable channels," said Floyd.

TAM made a separate presentation to the joint industry body on June 29. Delegates from the joint venture companies' regional and global headquarters attended the two presentations to provide additional information on the proposed plans for channel identification through signal injection.

"We are currently testing this method of channel identification with local and regional broadcasters in a number of markets including Australia and Hong Kong,"said Floyd.

TAM would produce a report to the technical committee of the joint industry body in its next meeting on the viability of polling through cellphones as an alternative to wireless data recovery, Floyd told the media representatives from the ad agencies and broadcasters.