The skirmish between India Today TV and Times Now over the last two-three weeks has played out like most such skirmishes do - with hoardings, e-mailers, claims and counterclaims using, what else, ratings data. Many in the trade loved the idea of Arnab Goswami getting his comeuppance when Times Now, which has led the English news genre for seven years, got pushed to number two by India Today TV (the erstwhile Headlines Today) a couple of weeks back. It bounced back within a week going by Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) data released last week.
This is not about the battle but about two worrying facts it throws up.
One, the tendency to cherry-pick data, from week to week or hour to hour, is something that TAM Media Research went hoarse warning everyone against. The same thing is happening with BARC data. The viewership of English news, for example, is less than half per cent of all TV viewed in India. "Because the viewership is so low we tell users to aggregate four weeks data and not dissect it on an weekly or hourly basis," says Partho Dasgupta, CEO, BARC. This is because for a really small genre such as English or business news, the sample is statistically unstable. And cherry-picking through it will give volatile and weird results. This gets editors, channel marketers and media owners all jumpy. BARC is currently reporting data from 12,000 homes and will do so for 20,000 in a bit. But in a market where TV reaches 161 million homes or 800 million people and where entertainment is the biggest driver, however much the sample grows, it cannot reflect on an hourly basis what all Telugu, Tamil or English news viewers are doing.
"The discourse (between competing news channels) is so pedestrian. These guys (news) represent the rump of the rump of the rump. Look at the way a Star, Sony , Zee or Viacom18 have conducted themselves, with absolute dignity," points out Paritosh Joshi, a member of the BARC technical committee and principal, Provocateur Advisory. You could argue that the sample for the entertainment channels is larger, more representative and, therefore, stable. They have less reason to carp or cherry-pick.
Maybe. But the competition levels are fiercer, there is more at stake. Entertainment gets more than half of the Rs 43,000 crore that the TV industry earns, news gets about Rs 3,000 crore. Yet there is rarely the kind of cherry-picking that news, music and other niche genres have been doing since the TAM days. In large part it was news broadcasters, upset with the volatility of data, who pushed for the change that eventually led to the creation of BARC. But it won't be long before the rumblings start against BARC, unless it puts in place 'fair use clauses,' or releases the data for niche genres only over a monthly or quarterly cycle. Dasgupta says BARC is trying to figure a way around.
The second fact - India Today's jump came from the use of dual frequency as a distribution tactic rather that higher time spent on the channel. According to Chrome Data Analytics & Media, in the week that it became number one India Today TV was on two spots on 70 cable networks across the country, the highest by any channel, giving it an extra reach of 22 per cent across all TV homes. This use of dual frequency helps increase reach and, therefore, sampling. Times Now responded in kind to jump back to number one.
This is a zero-sum game. Just getting one spot in a cable system could cost a news channel Rs 18-21 crore a year. Being in two spots would carry a 50 per cent premium on an average. Most analysts think these channels will be able to sustain this for another two weeks at most.
The largest news broadcasters are about Rs 450-500 crore in top line. Compare that to Star's Rs 7,200 crore or Zee's Rs 4,883-crore top line and you know what could happen if the big boys started using this tactic.
It is time then for the Indian Broadcasting Foundation, which has done a good job on getting BARC off the ground and content regulation, to start looking at this - before the regulator finds a reason to do so.
Twitter: @vanitakohlik
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