BARC India to increase panel size to 44,000 homes in FY19

Television rating agency Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India will increase its panel to 44,000 meters in FY19 from the current 33,000 meters. The plans is to finally take it up to 55,000 in the coming years.

The agency will also increase the number of panel homes in rural to 38% from the existing 33%.

“When we first started measuring TV viewership habits, 30% of our sample TV homes were in rural India. This went up to 33% when we expanded our meters to 33,000. This will further go up to 38% when we expand the meter homes to 44,000 by end of this financial year. This is a 153% growth in the rural sample,” PTI quotes BARC India CEO Partho Dasgupta as saying.

With return path data (RPD), the number of panel homes will scale up to 200,000. BARC has tied up with DEN Networks and Airtel Digital TV for RPD.

Dasgupta said that the agency is in talks with other players for RPD roll-out. RPD will help to curb panel home tampering, he added.

He also informed that the daily tune-ins on TV currently stands at 557 million and the daily average time spent per viewer watching TV is 3 hour 44 minutes.

The total TV viewership has gone up 39.4% to 28.3 billion impressions from 20.4 billion impressions. TV Viewership is highest among youth (15-30 years) even in the digital age.

Hindi movie channels have seen the highest viewership growth with an 87% increase. Hindi GEC and news have grown 6% and 13% respectively. Viewership for English channels has also gone up 6% to 122 million impressions from 115 million impressions.

HD Viewership has seen a 5.5 times growth in the last three years. Sports genre’s share gone up to 3% in 2018 from 1.8% in 2015. In the sports genre, while cricket still remains the most popular on TV, viewership of kabaddi has grown by 83%.

BARC India aims to morph into an insights company from being a mere data company. It is planning to get into digital viewership measurement with Ekam. However, the launch of Ekam has got delayed.

“One reason it is taking longer than estimated to launch Ekam is that we are working to build that consensus to get all key stakeholders onboard and aligned to the building blocks of Ekam. This will ensure all-round acceptance of the data. We also underwent a similar journey before launching TV viewership measurement,” Dasgupta said.