TRP scam an open secret, but industry seems disinclined to address problem

Thursday is for the television industry what Friday is for the cinema business in the country. Every Thursday, Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) comes out with viewership numbers that determine the advertising revenue a channel might get, quite like the first-day-first-show decides the fate of a just-released film across theatres, Friday after Friday. Last Thursday was different: Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh announced that a racket involving private TV channels manipulating their TRPs (TV rating points) had been busted. Ever since, it’s been one broadcaster’s voice against the other and one politician’s against the other.

At stake is the Rs 78,800-crore TV industry revenue (subscription and advertising put together), as estimated by EY as of 2019. Of this, Rs 32,000 crore is advertising revenue — a direct result of how a channel performs in the weekly TRP charts. The remaining Rs 46,800 crore is attributed to subscription revenue — which too can be partly influenced by the ratings popularity of a channel. Of the total TV revenue, broadcasters’ kitty is pegged at Rs 45,000 crore. As an analyst described the TRP phenomenon, it’s a money game with each stakeholder eyeing a bigger share, especially as competition with over-the-top (OTT) media services is restricting the growth of the television pie.

However, TRP manipulation and scams have been around for at least two decades in India. As Tamali Sen Gupta, a corporate lawyer, points out, it has been an open secret that a prominent broadcaster would typically give away free TV sets to households chosen for placing people-meters or bar-o-meters to record viewership data. The drill that the members of those households would have to go through was simple — keep one of the TV sets tuned to a particular channel and keep it on all day. While broadcasters are not supposed to know the identity of the sample households, it’s a hurdle easily crossed. “The point is TRPs can be distorted… It’s an old practice,’’ Sen Gupta says.

S Y Quraishi, former director general of Doordarshan, agrees. He blames the TRP-related crisis over the years on the lack of self-regulation in the broadcasting industry and the overall indifference towards the faulty system. He had met some of the top advertisers when he was trying to understand the loophole in the TRP system more than 15 years ago. “None of them had seen a people-meter and they didn’t know how it worked. All they said was they needed some data to determine viewership and this was the only one available,” Quraishi recalls.

That was the time when TAM (Television Audience Measurement), a joint venture between Nielsen and Kantar, ran the TRP show. In 2015, TAM sold its measurement business to BARC, which set up its government-certified TRP mechanism in 2016. The industry-owned body studies around 44,000 households, but the expectation of some sections of the TV industry as well as of the regulator is for BARC to have a much larger sample size. While those involved in audience measurement, whether it’s BARC or TAM, believe rigging of data has nothing to do with the size of the sample, others argue that a larger base would mean data tampering in some households wouldn’t distort the overall numbers. 

Even as cases of TRP discrepancies have kept surfacing, in 2003, a spat between Discovery and National Geographic Channel blew up when both claimed leadership position citing industry data. The biggest case in India was in 2012 when NDTV sued TAM India and its global parents, Nielsen and Kantar, for more than $1.3 billion alleging manipulation of ratings data. In a case filed in the Supreme Court of New York, NDTV had alleged that data was manipulated in favour of those channels that had paid money. A year later, that case was dismissed, but that was the beginning of the end for TAM’s hold on the TV industry.

Despite the changeover to BARC, it’s clear that the TRP system has not been cleansed. What really is the problem that the industry, regulator (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) and the government cannot resolve? A former Trai chairman says, “Everyone knows the ailment and the fraud, but it has not been addressed.”

Trai has issued three consultation papers and two sets of recommendations in the past decade or so. The latest recommendation was issued in April 2020, suggesting structural reforms in BARC to “mitigate the potential risk of conflict of interest, improve credibility, bring transparency and instil confidence in all stakeholders of the TRP measurement system.’’ Trai went into the specifics, saying that the restructured board of BARC India should provide for equal representation of the three industry associations  — Indian Broadcasting Foundation, Advertisers Association of India and Indian Society of Advertisers — with equal voting rights irrespective of their proportion of equity holding. Currently, broadcasters have a bigger say in BARC. The regulator has also highlighted the need for multiple data-collecting agencies and technologies for better data quality. It has also mandated the research agency to step up the sample size to 60,000 by the end of this year and 100,000 by end of 2022.

Research agencies have pointed out in their response to consultation papers issued by Trai that a regulatory framework, which provides for punitive action against defaulters, will go a long way in arresting some of the TRP-related manipulations.

The government, meanwhile, is yet to act on the Trai recommendations due to the Covid-19 lockdown. But according to a person closely associated with the rating system, the answer to the TRP crisis lies in allowing multiple agencies to offer TV audience measurement through various new technologies. “The government should say anybody who wants to do it can do it. Leave it free,” he says. Why have a single currency, he asks, citing global models where multiple systems co-exist. Also, it’s not an Indian crisis alone. Many countries, including the US, have had to deal with data manipulation, an analyst argues. 

And while BARC is the only official measurement organisation in the country, TAM is privately into audience measurement for some leading platforms, offering return path data technology—something that’s been recommended by both the regulator and many industry stakeholders as a solution to prevent data manipulation.