India’s television industry needs its audience ratings system back at the earliest, with senior media executives warning that the prolonged absence of a common measurement currency is creating uncertainty for broadcasters and advertisers and could accelerate the shift of advertising money from linear TV to digital.
The issue assumes greater significance as the industry enters the Dussehra-Diwali period, which accounts for nearly a third, or Rs 12,000-13,000 crore, of India’s estimated Rs 38,000-crore television advertising market.
The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), India’s television audience measurement body, has been unable to release ratings across genres since July following the non-renewal of its licence under the government’s new TV ratings policy. The industry had already been dealing with a disruption to news ratings since March 2026.
Speaking at a CEO panel at the FICCI Frames summit in Mumbai on Tuesday, Zee Entertainment Enterprises CEO Punit Goenka, Sony Pictures Networks India MD & CEO Gaurav Banerjee and NDTV CEO & Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal said the ratings framework needs to evolve with the changing media landscape.
“Regulation needs to keep pace with how the industry is evolving. If they do not keep pace with that, the industry will go on, but regulation will be viewed as a constraint, hampering the industry at some point or the other,” Goenka said.
He said ratings had been a “smart, interesting solve” for measuring television viewership, but the system now needed an upgrade.
“There needs to be an upgrade and the industry needs to think. They have begun to think about what that upgrade looks like,” Goenka said.
BARC has said it is expanding its panel of metered homes to 80,000 by October, while making changes to its governance and measurement framework to comply with the new ratings policy.
Banerjee said BARC remains the industry’s common measurement currency. “BARC is the only one universal currency which is acceptable to advertisers and broadcasters,” he said.
Kanwal said the absence of ratings leaves the industry without a neutral benchmark. “There has to be some neutral player who steps in and says, this is where things stand,” he said.
Calling the ratings blackout akin to “fighting an election without knowing who won”, Kanwal said ratings were essential to understanding who was watching television and to what extent.
“I think we need to bring ratings back as quickly as possible,” he said, warning that the blackout could accelerate the movement of advertising money from linear television to digital.
“It pushes money away from linear television faster to digital… and it’s terrible for the television business in general,” Kanwal added.