MUMBAI: News broadcasters Association (NBA) has agreed to have resumption of TAM Media Research’s viewership ratings data of all news channels from 9 January, a deferment of three weeks from the 19 December release date fixed earlier.
However, TAM, the only ratings provider in India, is yet to hear from the industry bodies including Association of Advertising Agencies of India (AAAI), Indian Society of Advertisers (ISA) and the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF).
One of the industry body members told Indiantelevision.com that discussions are on and no final decision has been made yet.
Earlier in the day, TAM said in a statement on its website that, “At the request of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and in concurrence with the ISA, AAAI and IBF, data of news channels is being withheld. From week 41 of 2012, data for news channels for all markets will be aggregated with ‘Others’.”
Accordingly, TAM was to release the later on Friday but decided it would first want to have “quick” consent letters from individual news channels (including members of NBA) stating their agreement with their channel’s viewing being clubbed into the category of ‘others’. Others category includes lesser viewed channels like religious channels and shopping channels.
In a later development, an official with NBA told Indiantelevision.com that the association has "agreed that TAM resume reporting of viewership data from 9 January, including for individual news channels and for the period since 7 October, no individual news channel data be reported." NBA has a strong weightage with almost all major news networks as its members, but there are a large number of smaller news channels which are not its members.
Indiantelevision.com has learnt that no conclusive decision seems to have been taken by the other industry bodies till the filing of this report. TAM has played it safe by asking individual news channels to give their consent.
TAM had suspended ratings of all genres from 7 October after an agreement with AAAI, ISA and IBF. It was to release data for the nine-week period of suspension on 19 December, but was asked by the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry to not resume reporting television ratings on the prodding of NBA.
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