DD versus TAM: CCI rules in DD's favour

On a complaint file by Doordarshan (DD), the Competition Commission of India (CCI) in a significant judgment has rules that TAM Media Research (TAM) has abused its position of strength with respect to measurement of viewership in contravention of the provisions of section 4 of the Act. It has further said that TAM which is the dominant and the only viewership measurement firm in India had caused irreparable advertising loss to DD by omitting it from viewership TRPs.

Speaking to Adgully, Uday Verma, Secretary, MIB, said “This Directive gives an opportunity to TAM to prove their transparency. We have been seeing such issues since long hence this time TAM has got a clear chance to prove themselves right in such a sensitive matter. We have been asking the broadcasters and the TAM officials to put in a more transparent mechanism and which is expected to set in place from 2014. Taking such a decision involves a lot of investigation and hence CCI must have thought and taken the decision thinking something.” 

Said Jawahar Sircar, CEO of Prasar Bharti, “We were being treated quite unfairly and were badly affected. Not only Doordarshan but even rural India has been in that league too. The next course of action by DD will depend on how the investigation gets done. We are waiting for the investigation results and then we would see how to take it further. With this I believe the advertisers have woken up to the fact that the ‘currency’ is the discounted one now. We have been able to challenge and now that the highest watchdog investigating company is also involved we are expecting to stand benefited out of the whole decision and order.”
 
TAM by virtue of its 8000 people meters installed in urban areas has failed to capture what the rural viewers watch, the kind of programmes they prefer as different from urban viewers. As such the urban sample size of urban viewers is not reflective of 120 million television households and is very small. CCI said that TAM has ignored and excluded rural viewership by virtue of which DD also left out as far as its TRPs goes. This means that only 30 per cent which constitutes urban viewership has been taken into account by TAM and 70 per cent which is the rural viewership cater by DD had been ignored. In fact taking this rational into account, people meters should have been installed accordingly.

This approach of TAM had adversely affected DD’s advertising revenues and may have also led to advertisers and consumers getting a wrong viewership picture. By ignoring rural viewership and not installing meters in rural areas, CCI said that Tam had misused technology to the detriment of DD. DD is the only channels with deep rural penetration and caters to the rural tastes with programmes that reflect rural culture, folk culture, agricultural inputs etc.

When asked about the ruling against TAM Media Research, L.V. Krishnan, CEO, said “TAM will be happy to cooperate with the CCI to give them the entire picture. We would be happy to cover the rural market if the industry supports funding. We had given proposals to DD for rural, but they didn’t want to fund it. TAM has never been a monopoly and studies like IRS cover rural markets as well. Besides that, if they want to go rural, there was another ratings system till 2011 and DD could have asked them to go rural. TAM has never claimed it covers the entire 1.2 billion population of India. From TAM’s perspective, if the entire industry or DD supports funding for us going rural, we would be happy to do that.”

CCI found enough evidence to refer the matter to the Director General (DG) for further investigation under section 26(I) of the Act. Now DG will conduct deeper investigation and fix responsibility on persons who took decisions that violated provisions of Competition Act. It remains to be seen what happens next. Keep watching this space for more updates.