TAM Media Research has dominated the Indian television viewership monitoring market for the last 10 years. The government is now inclined to bring more players into the fray and to play an active role in monitoring them.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India floated a consultation paper on the subject last month and set an April 21 deadline for feedback from stakeholders.
Shuchi Bansal caught up with TAM Media Research CEO L V Krishnan for his response to the government's move to monitor TV research and other controversies that TAM courts from time to time.
The government was mulling starting its own TV rating system and wants to now monitor the audience measurement agencies. Any comments?
I am surprised to see a direct government involvement as TV ratings are largely an industry exercise. The size of the TV ad industry - around Rs 6,600 crore (Rs 66 billion) - is quite small compared to other prominent service sectors like software or telecom. Within this, the size of the research industry is even smaller, although it plays a very crucial role.
But I don't think the government wants to set up its own monitoring system. It is only asking if it should play a role in regulating the industry.
My question is why should the government get involved with the TV ratings service alone? It needs to start regulating all types of rating outputs - like daily newspaper polls done via SMS or even TV polls during elections. Many of these don't even have clarity on sample sizes or methodology.
On the other hand, TAM has been proactively transparent. Every required detail of our research process is documented and submitted to the industry on a regular basis.
TAM is often criticised for its poor sample size, its Television Rating Points (TRP) system and much else. Still, the industry continues to subscribe to your data.
When you are in TAM's shoes, you can't escape criticism. It like an umpire officiating a match. We are open to criticism.
But is the current sample size sufficient to capture viewership trends in 70 million homes?
The sample size of 7,200 is set to touch 8,000 peoplemeters by 2008. Is the sample size right? The answer is yes and no. If we are representing urban Class 1 towns with more than 100,000 population, then the sample size is adequate.
But if somebody wants data on rural or semi-rural areas, obviously we need to expand. If somebody wants data of deeper sub-groups of population - say, media behaviour or TV consumption habits among premium car owners - then we need to boost the sample size in that sub-group.
So sample size is determined by the extent of coverage and depth of information that the industry wants.
Given the present depth of information and extent of coverage the industry has asked us to do, the sample size is sufficient. The minute you go beyond that, we need to increase sample sizes.
Haven't broadcasters asked for increasing the sample size to cover the rural markets?
They have. But I have to be very careful. The question is how many rural markets are really booming? There are 600,000 villages in the country. And 150 million homes in the rural market. But there are only 50 million homes (that is, 33 per cent) which have TV sets. So the basic entertainment medium is not available in most homes.
Are these are terrestrial or satellite TV homes?
I am talking about TV sets. Of these, only 50 per cent are cable homes, that is, only 25 million cable TV homes.
But even that's large since the overall cable and satellite market is 70 million homes.
I agree. But look at it the other way round. Of the 150 million homes in rural India, only one-third have TVs. Secondly, cable TV homes get only 10 or 12 satellite channels. So channel accessibility is limited. Third, very little TV viewing actually happens due to poor power supply.
The question is should audience measurement come first or should infrastructure gear up to increase viewing first? If one invests in that area, it should be worthwhile.
How many channels will want this data? On the other hand, the urban market is getting more and more fragmented. So should there be more measurement in urban India to get a better yield or should we continue chasing rural India?
Broadcasters complain that you promised but did not deliver viewership trends in addressable (DTH and CAS) homes?
We got new digital meters and started measuring CAS and DTH homes in 2005. But the penetration numbers were very low. Even now, the numbers are not astounding. There are 6.5 million DTH homes of which 50 per cent are free-to-air DTH homes, that is, they are Doordarshan DTH homes.
In the urban market, DTH is 5 per cent of the total cable and satellite homes. So, it is still small to report. But our Elite panel (the booster sample in SEC A) started in 2007, captures digital viewing.
Within the SEC A we find that the penetration of CAS and DTH has shot up to 30 per cent. Within that segment we are reporting digital data which is DTH and CAS from end-April.
What are the short-term and long-term viewership trends that you see emerging?
Compared to a decade ago or even five years back, the younger audiences are extremely impatient in their viewing behaviour. They channel surf continuously and hooking them for a longer period of viewing is very difficult.
Fifty per cent of their viewing time is spent on specialised content channels and this trend has grown from 14 per cent ten years ago.
With the advent of digital TV viewing experience, it is going to get tougher to hold this audience segment for longer time periods. You are already seeing the implication of this on advertising where today communication to this segment is being spread across a larger set of channels and across multiple media platforms too.
The second point on a longer-term trend is that the interaction point on TV was largely Prime Time a few years back. Although Prime Time still holds sway, thanks to a larger number of content distributed across day-parts available to the viewer on his TV set, new day-parts are also slowly emerging to deliver newer set of audiences.
Over the coming years, we will see advertising spread increasing on Non-Prime Time bands. For broadcasters, programme multiple repeat strategies will start playing a very crucial role in enhancing audiences and gaining additional advertising revenues.