After three months of hectic work, broadcasters and advertisers have come together to launch the Broadcast Audience Research Council or BARC, the industry-led alternate TV ratings agency. BARC has been registered as a not for profit body under Section 25 of the Companies Act but could take up to three years to become fully operational.
This is significant as the business of television audience measurement has come under the government scanner for alleged irregularities in ratings, data collection and assumed the responses of only 90 million cable homes in the country conducted by 10,000 meters to be true.
Therefore, in order to impart transparency, BARC has been constituted as a 60:40 joint venture between the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the apex body of all leading broadcasters and the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA), BARC will initially operate on a seed funding of Rs 30 crore and more funds will be made available as per the requirements felt by its council, Uday Shankar, CEO, Star India said.
BARC has been constituted to measure the broadcast space across platforms including terrestrial, cable, DTH, IPTV, Mobile TV and others. ?BARC will be run by professionals including a full-time CEO and a technical team. We are in the process of identifying the resources. Thereafter, BARC will conduct establishment study to determine how broadcast measurement will be conducted…these steps will take time and the outer limit is 36 months,? Punit Goenka, CEO, Zee Entertainment told FE.
However, BARC will not conduct audience measurement directly and instead commission independent specialist research vendors, said Jawahar Goel, president, IBF. Currently private agencies like TAM Media (TAM) and Audience Measurement and Analytics (aMap) provide the television measurement data to both broadcasters and advertisers from the 90 million cable homes and over 23 million DTH households.
BARC will soon float request for proposals (RFPs) for undertaking various activities including conducting establishment survey, panel design (for determining the sample size), operation of the panel, data processing, quality control among others. ?We hope there will be wide participation from various agencies and TAM or aMap can also participate but the BARC may contract one or more specialist research vendors through an open and transparent competitive bidding process,? Goenka said.