NEW TELEVISION AUDIENCE

MEASUREMENT SYSTEM FOR INDIA

Request for Information
This is a global Request for Information (RFI) being issued by the Broadcast Audience Research
Council, India (BARC) to seek understanding of the state-of-the art in the area of Television Audience
Measurement Research in particular and Audience Measurement Research in more general terms.

Background
BARC is a Joint Industry Body set up in India in 2012 with the specific purpose of designing,
commissioning, supervising and owning India’s Television Audience Measurement System. BARC is a
joint venture bringing together the three key stakeholders in Television Audience Measurement,
Broadcasters, Advertisers and Advertising & Media Agencies. Their respective apex bodies, the
Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) and the Advertising
Agencies Association of India (AAAI), represent the three industries. When BARC commissions the
new study, it is expected to replace the current vendor-owned, vendor-managed system operated
by TAM Media Research.

The three way alliance will ensure that the sizable resources - financial as well as intellectual,
required to mount such a massive, continuously running initiative are made available within a
robust, transparent and accountable governance framework and stakeholders, in India and around
the world, enjoy uninterrupted access to comprehensive, accurate, reliable and timely television
audience measures.

Scope of this RFI

BARC is committed to building a Television Audience Measurement System that becomes ipso facto
the Gold Standard in its class worldwide. Given that BARC addresses a population of over 1 Billion, of
which over 0.6 Billion have access to television in some form, it will settle for nothing less than being
the best.

Television audience measurement in India has been around for nearly three decades. Beginning with
a simple diary based system in the early 1980s covering Doordarshan, then the state owned
monopoly broadcaster, it evolved parallel to the evolution of the Indian TV market. By the mid-
1990s, it was already covering Satellite Television and in the early part of this century, India was one
of the earliest television markets to have a pure Peoplemeter based system.

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At various times, more than one vendor has attempted to provide audience measurement but from
2002, TAM Media Research, India- a joint venture of Nielsen and Kantar, has been the de facto
provider of the measurement currency, being widely used by all three stakeholder constituencies for
all commercial and marketing decision making.

It is clear that legacy architecture of the system, that has evolved incrementally, is now ready for
seminal change. It is less clear, however, what the contours of the new system will be.

The challenges for an audience measurement system in the era of Digitalisation bringing in its wake
a massive expansion in choice of content coupled with accelerating adoption of new technologies
that are time shifting consumption away from the Fixed Time Chart (FTC) and spatially shifting it to
personal digital appliances are altogether different from the era when television meant living rooms,
common choices and shared family experience.

BARC understands that a good system rests as much on a sound understanding of the footprint of
the medium: the Establishment Study; as it does on continuous tracking of viewing behaviour: the
Television Meter Panel. BARC is also aware of a number of technologies at varying stages of
development that promise non-intrusive or minimally intrusive viewership measurement. BARC is
also aware of developments in the area of integrated media consumption metrics e.g. IPA’s
Touchpoints 4 exercise scheduled for next year. All these are of interest to the architecture of the
future system in India. BARC expects respondents to incorporate their own experiences in these
areas as items of emphasis in the response to this RFI.

This RFI seeks ideas, templates, experiences, that will help BARC to blueprint the New Television
Audience Measurement System. The annexure lists a few questions that respondents may consider
addressing as a part of their response to this RFI.

Respondents will be expected to provide their inputs in the form of a report not to exceed 20 A4
pages in single spaced Verdana 10 point. Respondents should be willing to do a presentation not to
exceed 1 hour at a BARC specified location in Mumbai or New Delhi. Respondents need to provide
their credentials, TV measurement markets currently in their portfolio, organisation structure, focus
towards India and finally their experience with TV audience measurement research. Please ensure
your response reaches BARC on or before the end of office hours on February 5, 2013 at the
following address:

Broadcast Audience Research Council

c/o Indian Broadcasting Foundation

B-304, Third Floor, Ansal Plaza,

Khel Gaon Marg, Andrews Ganj,
New Delhi - 110 049.
INDIA

Email: RFIresponse@ibfindia.com

Respondents will receive the Request for Proposal (RFP) that will follow after the BARC concludes its
study of the inputs received. It must be made clear that non response to this RFI will preclude further
participation in the process that will lead up to the New Television Audience Measurement System.

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 Annexure: Some areas you may consider addressing

1. In-house knowledge and experience in the Television and more broadly, Media
Audience Measurement space

2. Global best practices in a number of areas including

a. Vendor owned and managed vs. Joint Industry Body (JIB) or Joint Industry
Committee (JIC) owned and managed – Advantages and Disadvantages

b. System architecture- Establishment, Metering, other services

c. One vendor or many vendors

d. If multiple vendors, how scopes of work are clearly delineated

e. If multiple vendors, how accountability is clearly defined

3. Sampling design: How viewership volume, viewing intensity, audience economic

attractiveness and other factors are accommodated

4. Measuring viewing across multiple screens

5. Measuring viewing across individual, family and community settings

6. Familiarity with Ascription, Data Fusion and Data Synthesis in multimedia

measurement

a. Need for fusing consumption data from multiple media

b. How fused data are being introduced into commercial application

7. Typical relative error levels in measurement systems operating in different

geographies.

a. Levels considered generally acceptable for a robust Peoplemeter system

b. Sampling designs that will ensure a systematically lower relative error

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8. Audit mechanisms typically put in place to ensure reportability of data

9. Keeping Panels representative of a fast changing Universe while allowing for

continuity of data reads without trend breaks