Updated: October 8, 2020 11:59:57 pm
For PRTs, it doesn’t matter what the entire country is watching, but essentially what the 45,000 households, which are supposed to represent the country’s television audience, have seen.
Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh said on Thursday that police are investigating a TRP manipulation scam (Television Rating Points) by tampering with devices used by the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India, which is mandated to measure television audience in India.
What is TRP?
In simple terms, PRTs represent how many people, from which socioeconomic categories, watched which channels for how long during a particular period. This could be for an hour, a day, or even a week; India follows the international standard of one minute. The data is usually made public every week.
A consultation paper on TV audience measurement and ratings in India presented by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in 2018 defined its importance as: “On the basis of audience measurement data, ratings are assigned to various television shows. Television ratings in turn influence programs produced for viewers. Better grades would promote a program, while lower grades would discourage a program. Incorrect ratings will lead to the production of shows that may not be really popular, while good shows may be left out. “
A FICCI-EY report on India’s media and entertainment industry from last year said the size of the TV industry was Rs 78,700 crore last year, and TRPs are the main currency for advertisers to decide on. which channel to advertise on by calculating cost per qualification point (CPRP).
What is BARC?
It is an industry body jointly owned by advertisers, advertising agencies and broadcasting companies, represented by the Indian Society of Advertisers, the Indian Broadcasting Foundation and the Association of Advertising Agencies of India. Although it was created in 2010, the I&B Ministry notified the Policy Guidelines for Television Rating Agencies in India on January 10, 2014 and registered BARC in July 2015 under these guidelines, to carry out television ratings in India.
How is the TRP calculated?
BARC has installed “BAR-O-meters” in more than 45,000 paneled homes. These households are classified into 12 categories under the New Consumer Classification System (NCCS), the so-called “new SEC” adopted by BARC in 2015, based on the level of education of the main earner and ownership of durable consumer goods of a list. of 11 elements ranging from an electrical connection to a car.
While watching a program, household members register their presence by pressing their viewer’s identification button (each person in the household has a separate ID), thus capturing the time during which the channel was viewed and by whom, and providing data on audience habits according to age and socioeconomic groups. The panel chosen to capture PRT must be representative of the country’s population and the methodology must be economically viable for the industry.
How can TRP data be manipulated?
If broadcasters can find the homes where the devices are installed, they can bribe them to watch their channels or ask cable operators or multi-system operators to make sure their channel is available as the “landing page” when Turn on the tv.
For PRTs, it does not matter what the entire country is watching, but essentially what the 45,000 households that are supposed to represent the country’s television audience have seen. Broadcasters can go to these households to modify the actual audience data.
In the 2018 consultation document, TRAI said: “One of the biggest challenges has been the absence of a specific law through which agents / suspects involved in manipulating / infiltrating the panel can be penalized.” It noted that BARC “has filed FIRs at various police stations against agents / suspects involved in panel tampering / infiltration,” but its efforts “to mitigate panel tampering / infiltration have been hampered due to the absence of a legal framework.” .
How does panel tampering affect TRPs?
TRAI mentioned that “panel infiltration has a significant impact when panel size is smaller” and “with increasing panel size, panel house infiltration becomes a challenge.”
An industry expert said BARC has filed multiple FIRs in the past “as it tracks unusual audience behavior and takes action.” In the current case, the source said that an FIR was filed against Hansa Research employees, which BARC hires for certain field jobs, such as going to panel homes. BARC contracts with multiple agencies so that no one agency has the complete map of panel households nationwide.
The source cited the example of English television news, which has a small share of the national audience pie at around 1.5%, which means that for around 45,000 panel households, around 700 households will contribute to the audience. “What really happens is that even though their sample is around 700, not everyone watches TV news in English every day. The actual surveillance will be around 350 homes. “In such a scenario, the source said,” if you manage to mount 10 among the high-visibility houses, then you can move the needle in a big way. “
When the sample is smaller, “the manipulation becomes easier”. In a genre like English news, “because fewer households will carry more weight, the change in one household’s behavior is amplified on a much larger scale across the country.”
Also, as each channel tries to project itself as a market leader in a particular segment, it divides the data into socioeconomic parentheses based on NCCS, age, gender, time slots (prime time), etc. to find the perfect data segment. This also increases the relative error in the data, due to the small sample size.
How often have allegations been made?
For more than a decade, people in the industry have raised questions. In a letter to the president of BARC in July, the president of the Association of News Stations, Rajat Sharma, owner of India TV News, complained about the ratings of TV9 Bharatvarsh and said that “several news stations have written to him to BARC to draw their attention that each week’s ratings do not correlate with television basics ”and“ manipulated data is released week after week without taking any corrective action. ”Sharma had said that“ these are corrupt practices, that are being done with total collusion with BARC and the station. “
Two years ago, the I&B Ministry had raised concerns that BARC was reporting less audience from Doordarshan, and launched the idea of chip-based activity logs across all set-top boxes. The idea was finally rejected.
In 2017, the editor of one of the top five English news channels had written to BARC about how some households in Gujarat were contributing heavily to the general audience of a rival channel.
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