INTRODUCTION
TRP ratings used by television channels to promote their shows stands for Television Rating Points. It is a measure that lets people judge which television show is being viewed more on which channel and at what time. TRP is a tool that helps an agency to measure the popularity of a show on any channel and eventually rank which channel grabbed more views for the maximum amount of time by television viewers. TRPs are useful because they denote that the higher the TRP, the higher the visibility, and eventually the higher the revenue.
In the competitive world of privately-owned TV channels, TRPs validates the popularity in the competition. However, more precisely, it translates into more revenue because advertising companies plan to spend their advertising budgets on the basis of which TV channel is scoring higher TRPs in order to ensure that the advertisements get more views.
In India, there are various television rating agencies that calculate TRPs. These are namely Television Audience Measurement (TAM), Indian National Television Audience Measurement (INTAM), Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC), and Doordarshan Audience Research Team (DART), which mainly focuses on rural areas of India.
TAM is owned by the Indian Market Research Bureau(IMRB), the research wing of HTA, while INTAM is owned by ORG-MARG. BARC, India is a joint industry body founded by stakeholder bodies that represent Broadcasters (IBF), Advertisers (ISA), and Advertising & Media Agencies (AAAI). It is also the world’s largest television measurement science industry-body.
There are a few ways in which TRPs are calculated using electronic appliances:
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People’s Meters: Few agencies use a ‘People’s Meter’, which is a device attached to the television in the households of the sample size being surveyed. This device records the time and the program that the viewers watch on a particular day. After that, an average is taken on a weekly basis to know the viewership status. The collected information is then analyzed by the agency which then puts out the data in TRP terms.
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Picture Matching: A newer and more efficient technique for calculating TRPs in India is Picture Matching, in which the People’s Meter repeatedly records a small portion of the picture that is watched on a particular television set. This data is collected from the sample homes and used to derive the TRPs on a national scale.
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Audio Watermark: Audio Watermarking embeds audio watermarks in video content before it is uploaded and broadcasted. The watermarks are not heard by the human ear but can be detected and decoded when it is broadcast to derive viewership data.
As per the reports from April 2020, BARC’s current sample size is 44,000. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had recommended that the agency’s sample size should be increased to 60,000 by the end of 2020 and to 100,000 by the end of 2022.
A TRP scam primarily means when a television channel pays households and viewers to keep their television channels switched on in order to manipulate the TRP ratings which would lead to high TRPs which further would help the channels to attract more advertising companies which would be beneficial for the channels in monetary terms as well as a lead in their respective industry.
In a recent case of Republic Tv news channel TRP scam, Mumbai’s top cop, Param Bir Singh on 8th October 2020, announced that his team had busted a scam to manipulate the TRP ratings and increase advertising revenues by Republic TV and two other Marathi channels namely, Box Cinema and Fakt Marathi. Cops had arrested 4 people namely, Vishal Bhandari (aged 21), a former employee of Hansa Research, Bamopallirao Mistri (aged 44), who earlier worked in film production houses, the proprietor of Fakt Marathi Shirish Shetty, and owner of Box Cinema, Narayan Sharma, aged 47 years. They were booked under cheating (Section 415 of the Indian Penal Code,1860) and criminal breach of trust (Section 405 of the Indian Penal Code,1860).
According to Mumbai Police, families including those in slums were paid about four to five hundred rupees a month to keep these three channels switched on in order to manipulate the ratings in order to increase TRPs. The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) gave the responsibility and contract to install barometers in Mumbai to monitor TRPs to a company named Hansa Research. Hansa filed a police complaint against some ex-employees who misused data on households where TRP monitoring systems were installed. So far, the Mumbai Police has recorded statements of Republic Group CEO, Vikas Khanchandani, CFO, Shiva Sundaram, COO, Hersh Bhandari, executive editor, Niranjan Narayanswami Hansa, and CEO, Praveen Nijhar.
The television industry has been a divided industry and not known for its unity yet the entire industry came together to criticize Republic Tv at the time when the scam came to light. The Broadcast Audience Research Council has suspended its weekly Tv ratings for three consecutive months.
The channel appealed before the Supreme Court seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI) investigation but the apex court directed to approach the High Court. The company running Republic Tv channels and Arnab Goswami moved the High Court seeking to restrain coercive action by the Mumbai police and for handing over the investigation to the CBI team.
A committee has been formed which is headed by Prasar Bharati CEO, Shashi Shekhar Vempati, in order to review the guidelines on the television rating agencies present in India which submitted the report to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB). The main issue raised was to ensure greater transparency in the TRP system and the transparency today is based on 55,000 meters (which is used to calculate TRP) area. The area requires expansion so that there is no scope of manipulation. The committee has received the report and after discussing it would hand over the same to TRP agency Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) and issue the council certain directions based on the committee’s recommendations. This report is a huge step in order to bring transparency to the television industry and to make the TRP rating calculations transparent.
-Raj Vardhan Agrawal
Amity University, Kolkata.
LAWBEES 