TAM India has applied for a licence to operate as an audience measurement agency under the Television Ratings Policy, 2026, sources familiar with the matter told FE, potentially paving the way for a second television ratings provider in the country.
The application was submitted earlier this week to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), sources said. Executives at TAM India were not immediately available for comment.
If the licence is granted, it will mark TAM’s return to television audience measurement a decade after it exited the space. TAM had provided television ratings from 1998 to February 2016, before ceasing to provide data following the rollout of the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India as the industry’s television ratings currency.
TAM’s ownership structure is also no longer a hurdle to its participation in the business. TAM India was earlier a 50:50 joint venture between Nielsen and Kantar Media, which was previously owned by WPP as part of the Kantar Group. Kantar Media separated from the Kantar Group and was acquired by H.I.G. Capital in 2025.
TAM’s latest application comes as the television industry awaits clarity on the return of BARC under the new regulatory framework. BARC’s television ratings across genres have been suspended since early July, pending licence renewal and registration under the new Television Ratings Policy, 2026.
It is unclear when BARC ratings will resume. Some industry experts, however, expect the ratings to return by the end of the calendar year, when BARC is likely to complete the expansion of its measurement panel. BARC is looking to increase its metered homes to 80,000 from the current 67,000, as the industry pushes for tighter governance and more robust viewership data.
For the television industry, ratings serve as its trading currency, helping broadcasters price advertising inventory while enabling advertisers and media agencies to allocate marketing spends and assess campaign performance.
Broadcasters have warned that a prolonged suspension of ratings could accelerate the diversion of advertising budgets away from television, at a time when the industry is already grappling with slowing advertising growth.
Unlike BARC, which uses people meters to measure television viewership, TAM has proposed a measurement system based on return-path data (RPD). The system collects information on television viewing directly from digital cable boxes, satellite receivers or smart TVs and transmits the data to the service provider.
RPD offers greater scale and can provide minute-by-minute viewing data across millions of households. However, critics argue that it measures what a device is displaying rather than whether an individual is actually watching.
People meters, by contrast, use specialised hardware installed on televisions in a selected group of sample homes. Each registered household member is assigned a specific button on the remote control and presses it when they start and stop watching television. This allows the system to capture viewing behaviour at an individual and demographic level.