Appetite for TV in India continues to be on the rise: Partho Dasgupta

Partho Dasgupta, CEO, BARC India, recounts the key developments in the broadcast industry in India as well as shares what excites him the most in 2019. 

On broadcast industry in 2018 

Looking back, it has been a challenging but a good year for the industry. The appetite for TV in India continues to be on the rise, and this has led to new channel launches, especially in the regional languages. This has also provided advertisers with an opportunity to cater to specific audiences and increase their opportunity to see. 

As a measurement body, we have increased the size of our panel to 33,000 homes to provide the industry with a more robust viewership data, and plan to scale this to 44,000 by March 2019. On the basis of feedback from the market and stakeholders, we have also stopped reporting TV viewership from analogue homes and migrated completely to digital. This has led to increased consumption in the number of channels as well as time spent. We have also strengthened our vigilance mechanism to tackle panel tampering, which has been a big concern. 

On looking forward to 2019 

We work in a very dynamic industry, where nothing can be predicted before- hand. So far, we have been successful in keeping up with the industry needs through constant innovation and will continue doing so. We look forward to getting all players on board and implement key projects such as Total Video Measurement and Sample Return Path Data, which will be another breakthrough for the industry. 

2019 is also the year for General Elections in India, the first since we started reporting All India data in 2015. It will be exciting to see the impact it will have on TV viewership. 

On Ekam’s progress 

BARC India has been able to provide the industry with a robust and transparent TV viewership measurement system. In the same way, our aim is to help the industry grow by providing third-party and transparent digital viewership data. Our goal, as is the need of industry, is total video measurement and to provide insights into media spend across TV and digital. We are currently in the process of building consensus among all stakeholders on measurement and reporting standards.

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