How TV failed to watch itself

ByArchna Shukla


Around two years ago, a senior executive from a TV audience research organisation told this writer that a leading broadcaster was seeking its help, to build influence in a certain market. This essentially meant installing audience measurement equipment (people meters) in houses identified by the broadcaster. Interestingly, this broadcaster was also a vociferous critic of the prevailing measurement system.

Whether the agency gave in to the broadcaster’s persistence is not known but the story sums up the pulls and pressures under which the television audience research business has been operating in India.

The government’s latest decision to constitute a committee to set up a transparent and effective TRP system in the country is a statement not on the efficacy of television viewership research agencies, but on the broadcast industry’s utter failure in resolving one of the many challenges confronting it.

For those who came in late, TRP, or television rating point, is the unit in which television viewership is measured. TRPs denote the percentage of viewers a programme or a channel gets during a particular time period.

It is strange that in the entire debate around television viewership measurement, fingers have only been pointed at the research agencies. Their TRPs have been held responsible for much of the malaise.

The general perception has been that in their blind chase for TRPs, television channels were churning out the kind of programming that will help them attract eyeballs, and in return, advertisers. News channels, which traditionally get lower viewership and hence, lower advertising, have been at the forefront of devising innovative ways of building healthy TRPs. The result has been programming that can hardly be described as responsible and tasteful. It was essentially the aggressive TRP-chase led by news channels that brought the debate of viewership measurement into public domain. Before this, TRP-bashing was essentially the industry’s internal time-pass.

... contd.