New monitor for India's booming TV
industry By Raja M
MUMBAI - A
new television viewing monitoring system has been
introduced to give Indian broadcasters, advertisers and
media planners an overdue alternative to knowing how
viewers are watching the 200 channels beamed into
India's 85 million TV households.
Leading global
TV ratings finder AC Nielsen Media Research's Television
Audience Measurement (TAM) held the TV viewership
measuring monopoly until now.
Ratings influence
who gets the bigger slices of India's US$1.18 billion
(Rs 45 billion) television advertising market that is
heading rapidly upwards. With 48 million subscribing to
cable TV, India has the world's third-largest but most
complex couch potato market.
The chairman of
India's Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani (ranked 13th
in Fortune's August 2004 list of the 25 most powerful
Asian businessmen), predicted the Indian media and
entertainment industry would be worth $200 billion in 20
years. Industry watcher Indiantelevision.com expects
India to have 95 million cable TV households by 2010.
Hoping to help advertisers and media planners
make better sense of this TV watching maze is the new
chip-based technology called aMap (for Audience Map).
Unveiled this week, aMap promises daily ratings of
viewer trends, as against the weekly ratings provided by
AC Nielsen-TAM. The Ahmedabad-based firm marketing the
new technology, Audience Measurement and Analytics Ltd
(AMA), hopes that aMap could be also modified to monitor
Internet, newspaper, cinema and radio usage.
According to Professor Matthias Steinmann, the
inventor of the People Meter and founder and chief
executive officer of the Swiss-based Telecontrol AG, the
aMap service makes India Asia's first overnight online
TV audience rating provider.
A People Meter is
state of the art electronic equipment that can
automatically measure TV viewing, and is a standard for
rating televisions worldwide. TV watching habits were
monitored through diaries 20 years ago, with selected
viewers recording their preferences on paper. Use of the
obviously far more comprehensive People Meters grew with
the cable TV explosion of the 1990s.
From sample
TV households, between 2 am to 4 am daily, the new
Indian entrant, AMA's aMap chip, gathers data on TV
viewing from the People Meters and sends it via a mobile
phone call to a central server. Subscribers can
instantly access the reports through a virtual private
network connection. The real-time process involves no
human intervention, unlike TAM that physically scoops
data through field agents visiting sample households.
However, TAM responded that the data collected
mechanically would be too raw to be reliable. "We
physically validate our weekly data before it goes out,"
Uday Kumar Shetty, director of core services at Nielsen
Media Research, told Asia Times Online. He expressed
doubts how TV viewership data going directly from
individual households could be extrapolated in a larger
market sense. AC Nielsen, owned by the Dutch media
company VNU, has been measuring TV audiences in America
since the 1950s.
Most industry players welcomed
the competition, the first since TAM merged with India's
earlier TV viewer measuring agency INTAM in 2003.
Pallavi Iyer, media planner at Carat, the world's
largest independent media agency ($17.9 billion in
global billings last fiscal), told Asia Times Online
that there definitely was a need for an alternative TV
viewership measurement. "On one occasion, the TAM
figures gave a TRP [Television Rating Points] of between
3 and 4 for Star Utsav [part of Rupert Murdoch's Star TV
network]. But I found it to be closer around 0.8." Iyer
says that she invariably does independent research for
major clients.
But a bigger, central problem
challenging any TV viewership measurers is the sample
size of households, with persistent doubts about how a
minuscule monitoring system can speak for India's
diverse TV market. The bristling issue burst open three
years ago in a major controversy when the confidential
list of sampling households was leaked to the media.
"The sampling size is pathetic," observes Ralph
Paes, general manager of a national publication with 30
years experience as a media professional. "You cannot
throw away clients' money without knowing where it is
going. How can a sampling size of, say, 600 viewers in a
city like Mumbai reflect viewership trends of 15 million
people? Niche channels tend to lose out."
Shetty
says TAM has 4,565 of the imported People Meters
installed in India at a cost of $5,400 each. Mumbai has
450 People Meters. "Around 5,000 People Meters work well
in large TV viewership countries such as the USA and the
UK," says Shetty. On whether a sample size of 4,500
would be enough to deal with India's diversity - India
has 37 national languages - Shetty says that TAM data
shows the differences in viewing habits between regions
does not vary much.
To tackle complaints that
niche channels were being ignored, TAM had announced
plans this June to install a new set of People Meters to
track the media consumption habits of high income
groups. Not surprisingly, the share of niche channels in
the TV advertising business is twice their viewership
share. Two percent of total viewership of premium
channels such as HBO and STAR Movies rake in 4% of the
total ad revenue.
AMA says that 1,000 aMap
meters have been installed in India, with Mumbai (400),
Delhi (400) and Ahmedabad (200). The number could be
increased to 20,000 in two years. But the figure
advertising houses are more comfortable with is at least
around 10,000 meters for a city such as Mumbai.
"Otherwise credibility is a big problem,"
Abhijit Bannerjee, managing partner of medium-sized
advertising agency Wavelength Communications ($1.3
million annual billing) told Asia Times Online. "Around
350 families in my apartment block watch TV. I find it
hard to believe that around 300 People Meters can speak
for the entire city of Mumbai. But for want of any other
alternative, we have to go by the TRP."
Raviratan Arora, managing director of AMA, says
aMap has around 30 variables with the option of 256
other variables to measure viewership, such as also
factoring in the fact that the same TV channel could be
on for five hours with no one in the house watching it
except the family dog. AMA says that their system can
automatically measure what Indians in New York watch for
instance. The user simply defines the sample base,
installs the People Meters and then makes the calls
accordingly. An actual physical presence is not needed.
However, better than such fine selling points
for monitoring systems, the move promising more credible
times for India's TV advertising business is the
lobbying presently on for an industry watchdog - a
monitor to monitor the TV rating agencies.
Raja M is an independent writer based
in Mumbai, India.
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