BARC India applauds IIT’s new TV ratings solutions
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Rebecca Hawkes
| 27 December 2018

India’s Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India has announced the results of its work with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) to provide more robust TV viewership measurement data.

BARC India has been seeking new methods for channel, content and ad identification as well as alternative to button pushing and current visible meter used for capturing viewership data from panel homes.

The best solution, proposed by a final year student at IIT Kharagpur called T.Y.S.S. Santosh, can potentially transform large conspicuous hardware in panel homes to user-friendly smart assistants, and also reduce dependency on third parties for channel identification, said BARC.

IIT Kanpur and IIT Bombay were runners up in the contest, which attracted the ideas of 10 IITs. The three winning options are all platform agnostic, and will now enter further feasibility testing. If successful, they will be incorporated into BARC’s measurement system, which provides industry data for a country of 197 million TV homes, with 836 million TV owners.

“Indian TV industry is dynamic and its needs are ever-evolving. India faces several unique issues such as power cuts, data connectivity challenges, wide disparity in temperature and climatic conditions etc., all of which impact collection of data. It thus is important for us to keep innovating and thinking ahead,” said Romil Ramgarhia, COO, BARC India.

“We are delighted to see the young and bright minds from the most premier technology institute of India coming up with some extraordinary solutions. Through this partnership, we also want to encourage students to take technology from research labs to end users, impacting a million lives,” he added.

IIT Karagpur’s T.Y.S.S. Santosh IIT Kharagpur said: “We are happy to be the Gold winners in the battle between all IITs in this tough competition. BARC India’s challenging case study demanded working on inter-disciplinary components of tech that is hardware, software, machine learning and artificial intelligence to propose a new solution to the existing state of the art technology available with BARC India”.

BARC India is a joint industry company representing broadcasters, advertisers and advertising and media agencies.