BARC India: Tamper-proof TV viewership ratings

What India is watching? Which show has garnered the maximum ratings? Which channel is the most watched? These are some of the pertinent questions every viewer asks. It is also important for broadcasters to know which of their shows is loved by that audience because the audience is the end-user and the market. India’s sole registered TV viewership measurement company BARC India has been mandated by industry stakeholders to measure “what India watches”. BARC India strictly follows Government of India guidelines on the subject. Towards achieving this goal, a BARC India statement said, it uses an advanced, audience measurement technique -- audio watermarking -- to track content through its broadcast cycle. This is a code inserted into the audio channel of the television signal which transmits through distribution platforms and cannot be either deleted or overwritten in the cryptographic family it adopts. This increases integrity and reliability of data generated by BARC India’s ratings. Audio Watermarking technology has another advantage - of being platform-agnostic. Since the content is finger-printed with a unique Watermarked ID that cannot be tampered with, its viewership can be tracked irrespective of the feed being carried on multiple platforms.

Many times broadcasters claim to be the number one channel in a particular slot and frequency. Commenting on the same, BARC India said, “Broadcasters may opt to make their channel(s) available on more than one slot or frequency on a particular distribution platform for a variety of reasons: such decisions are entirely within the domain of the broadcaster and distribution platform (DTH, Cable etc.). Regulatory issues pertaining to this, if any, would lie within domain of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). By virtue of its mandate, and the technology deployed, BARC Indiameasures viewership of a watermarked channel, irrespective of the platform it is available on, and also the number of instances within that platform. As long as all/multiple feeds carry the same unique watermark, BARC India’s Bar-o-Meters would read all of them as one channel and would report its ratings as a single channel. In effect, multiple instances of a channel on a single platform is not very dissimilar to its availability across multiple platforms, or distribution modes.