MUMBAI: On Day two of FICCI Frames' session titled ‘Lord of the Ratings’, BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta, IPG Mediabrands CEO Shashi Sinha, Colors CEO Raj Nayak and Silver Push CEO and co-founder Hitesh Chawla got together to discuss issues facing audience and content measurement on television and other platforms. The session was moderated by India TV CEO Paritosh Joshi.

Measuring content content consumption across diverse platforms instead of simply tracking broadcast viewership was an issue that the panel grappled with, even as comparisons raged with erstwhile industry data provider TAM.

Nayak agreed with Dasgupta's suggestion that niche channels should not be going through a weekly data churn and that the ratings should be given out only after a four week observation. Another important suggestion from Nayak that Dasgupta agreed in principle was that pay TV channels and FTA channels should be rated separately by BARC.

The panelists agreed BARC should ideally cover as many households as possible, but that this could be done only gradually with an addition in the sample size every year. The latest Broadcast India data has recently been compiled, covering 3,00,000 households to shortlist a sample size of 20,000 households.

Dasgupta also stated that BARC is moving towards digital and mobile content data coverage by the end of this year. “A few weeks ago we changed the metrics to impressions because we are looking at covering audio-visual content on all the mediums,” averred Dasgupta.

BARC is also looking at getting more support from its stakeholders at the moment to penetrate in the audio-visual market completely. However, audio-visual market is not the only medium that they would be limiting themselves to. They will also enter the radio and print market over a period of time.