According to Ministry of Information and Broadcasting guidelines, BARC India is prohibited from providing consultancy services or indulging in such advisory role, which would lead to a potential conflict of interest with its main objective of providing TV ratings. This is also in line with global best practices where the ratings are being done by joint industry companies.
With this, BARC India will build a small pool of approved consultancy companies, which will allow subscribers to choose their supplier and also help mitigate against potential conflicts of interest when dealing with potentially competing clients. Interested parties can submit proposals for providing TV Viewership related consultancy services to BARC India subscribers.
"BARC India being a joint industry company of broadcasters, media agencies and advertisers needs to remain independent and objective and hence cannot provide consultancy service to subscribers. However, after building a strong television audience measurement system in the country, we have now decided to grant licenses to select consultancy companies to provide analysis to our subscribers who are in need of professional consultancy service to effectively utilise and strategise with BARC India data," said Partho Dasgupta, CEO, BARC India.
While BARC India data will continue to be delivered directly to subscribers via the BARC India Media Workstation (BMW) analysis system, consultancy companies will be able to analyze this data using their own systems to generate consultancy outputs. However, these systems cannot be made available to subscribers as an alternative to BMW system.