Television Rating Point (TRP) is a tool provided to judge which programmes are viewed the most.
-This gives us an index of the choice of the people and also the popularity of a particular channel.
-For calculation purpose, a device is attached to the TV set in a few thousand viewers houses for judging purpose. -These numbers are treated as sample from the overall TV owners in different geographical and demographic sectors.
-It records the time and the programme that a viewer watches on a particular day. -Then, the average is taken for a 30-day period which gives the viewership status for a particular channel.
-It is the tool that tells us which channel and the programme are viewed most or it indicates the popularity of a TV channel or a programme.
-It shows how many times people are watching a channel or a particular programme.
-TRP enables advertisers and investors to understand the mood of the people.
-According to the TRP of a TV Channel or programme advertisers decide where to display their advertisements and investors will decide about the investment of the money.
-TAM Media Research is a joint venture company between AC Nielsen and Kantar Media Research/IMRB.
-It is one of the two television Audience measurement analysis firms of India.
-The company had enjoyed a monopoly in the television ratings market in India till 2015.
-Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC India) was being propelled as an alternate TV viewership measurement system to the incumbent
-It was set up as per guidelines of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India.
-It is mandated to design, commission, supervise, and own a television audience measurement system for India, and provides Indian broadcast sector with a real-time television rating points (TRP) measurement system to decide the fate of the 27000 crore spending on TV advertising.
-What is Scam?
-A scam or confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence or a clever but dishonest plan for making money.
-Now the question is how in TRP SCAM takes place?
-The method is simple: the consultant gets to know the homes where the people-meters that measure viewership are located.
-These are meant to be anonymous homes, but the consultant manages to find out addresses.
-He visits the people-meter homes, gives them a brand-new 60-inch plasma TV and says, “Watch whatever you like on this lovely big TV, but on the TV attached to the people-meter, you must watch this list of channels.
-The family also gets an additional reward at the end of the year if they’ve done what they were asked to do efficiently.
-In fact, Nielsen sent out their global head of security to India and, after a four-month elaborate investigation, he said, “I have never seen as much corruption of the Nielsen system anywhere else in the world.”
-the matter involves not only the Rs 27,000 crore of revenue that TV channels garner from advertisers and product sellers, it also affects the more critical phenomenon of agenda-based television controlling public tastes and views.
-these ratings are important mainly to those who pump money into commercial advertisements on TV as they need to ascertain who and how many are likely to be watching the various channels.
-The US is dominated by a private company, Nielsen, that covers some 80,000 households with its measuring devices, but as families are smaller there, the total number of viewers tracked would be considerably less than two lakh.
-India’s BARC has set up 44,000 bar-o-meters in selected television households to calibrate the choices of some two lakh viewers because family sizes here are larger.
-A constant criticism against BARC is that 44,000 meters can hardly claim to represent the views of nearly 20 crore television households.
-That the above act of tampering with the actual collection of data by interfering and influencing the households.
-The persons behind these criminal acts have hatched a criminal conspiracy with the intention to interfere with the legitimate collection of Data and thereby cheat other channels, advertisers and finally the public,