Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India, launched two years ago to measure and assess TV viewership in India, has announced its first data for week 16 of 2015.
As per BARC data, Star Plus was the leading Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) in the Hindi-speaking markets (HSM), Zee emerged as a strong player in the regional channels such as Marathi and Telugu, Aaj Tak was the leader in Hindi news (HSM) and Times Now led in the English News category (All India).
Among Tamil GEC, Sun TV was the leader followed by Star Vijay. Discovery led the infotainment category.
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“With an aim to bring in utmost transparency within the ecosystem, BARC India will certainly be the best solution to report what the nation is actually watching,” Punit Goenka, Chairman BARC India said in a statement.
The technology used will help BARC India to be future-ready, and with over 300 channels being watermarked, BARC India relies heavily on its technology. The data from BARC includes one lakh plus cable and satellite (C&S) markets corresponding to a sample size of 10,760 households.
BARC India will monitor 12,000 sample households using a stratified random sampling technique. This will go up to 20,000 reporting homes, with the addition of the less than one lakh urban markets and rural areas to represent ‘What India Watches’ in line with the Government of India January 2014 notification.
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“There is a lot of effort that has gone into getting it off the ground, and till two months ago, there was scepticism as to whether we would meet the deadline,” said M.B. Parameswaran, Chairman, Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) and BARC India board member. “In a few weeks, we will get more granular data and in three months, fairly in-depth data.”
BARC India was set up as a collaboration between advertisers and the TV broadcasters to replace TAM (Television Audience Measurement) media research data. Broadcasters had complained that TAM data was inaccurate. BARC was set up by Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), AAAI and Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) two years ago.
“From household data now, we expect to also have individual data by June,” Bharat Patel, board member of BARC India and former Chairman of ISA, said. “Data from BARC is more acceptable and reliable as it is an industry-controlled body with representation for all stakeholders.”