India had better watch itself, as it seems to be falling into the same virtual monopoly trap for TV audience measurement that much of the western world has already spent 25 years trying to get out of. This week Meterology Data Limited (MDL) was set up and it says very clearly it is to be the “Single” TV viewership data provider with effect from 29th February.
Meterology is a joint venture between BARC India and TAM India and it will use people metering. TAM India is owned by Nielsen and global agency WPP, including involvement of WPP’s Kantar data subsidiary as well.
But India’s reasoning is perhaps understandable. There was a major shake-up in June 2013 when many of the leading broadcasters simply refused to use the Television Audience Research (TAM India) data claiming it had a flawed methodology, too low a sample set, and that it cost too much. At the time TAM was showing falling viewing at a time when more and more homes in India acquired more and more TV services. Typically, the combined big 6 DTH services have been adding 8 to 9 million new customers a year, while cable TV has fallen in numbers, but not enough to account for those 8 million additions.
Nielsen has always pushed the idea of people meters throughout its global network of 100 companies – devices where each household member flicks a switch to say they have entered a room with a TV in, but TAM failed to take a large enough sample, primarily due to the high cost of sampling, in a country of almost 1 billion people. Pay TV and therefore advertising, is cheap in India, so similarly sampling had to be cheap for Nielsen to make money. There were also large concerns that global agency WPP was a 50% shareholder, and its advertising sales were based on viewing figures from TAM, so it had a huge vested interest.
Since then the Indian Broadcasting Foundation created its own Broadcasting Audience Research Council (BARC) mirroring moves that have been made elsewhere, such as in the UK and France. But it is now letting Nielsen and Kantor back into the fold. The announcement this week is that TAM will merge with BARC to create MDL. Shareholding will be 49% Nielsen and Kantar, and 51% to BARC India. All the meters that Nielsen brought to the party will be used by BARC as well as its own, ramping up the sample size.
India is very slow in its ambition to bring broadband to every home or village, with just 12 million DSL lines and the wide ranging cable networks in many cases needing upgrading to two way networks before broadband can be sent over them. As a result, automatic data collection from click stream (remote control clicks) is a long way off, perhaps decades.
BARC India will now be the sole operation to market the audience data, and it will come from MDL, who will run and manage meter operations and supply raw data to BARC India. Nielsen and WPP will still see half of the profits for a failed, legacy operation.
The idea was first put forward in August 2015 and it has taken this long to sort out the details. The number of meters now deployed will raise by the addition of another 12,000 meters contributed from TAM.
Meanwhile back in the US, Nielsen says that the $1.2 billion turnover Media General will renew its subscription to Nielsen’s local TV measurement service for all of its stations across 48 markets. Recently Nielsen in the US has been losing customers to the new merged comScore and Rentrak.