MUMBAI: With only a few months left for Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) to start operations full-swing, BARC conducted technical workshops for broadcast engineers to enable them get a deeper understanding of the watermark technology.

The workshops that were conducted countrywide between 18-21 March, aims to help in understanding the deployment of the future watermarked system at the broadcaster’s end.

The workshop was conducted by technical experts from BARC’s technical partners. Watermarking technology inserts a mark inaudible to the human ear into programs. This mark contains the identification of the channel which broadcasts the program and the regular broadcast timestamps. The meters installed in panelists' homes can retrieve this information. This audio watermark is inaudible to viewers, and is compatible with both digital and analogue broadcasting.

On successful completion of this workshop, BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta said, “It was a delight to see a massive and encouraging participation from 150+ broadcast personnel at the recently concluded watermarking technical workshop by BARC. This technical workshop was successfully conducted at multiple locations in India. It gave a unique opportunity for the broadcasters to interact directly with the technology and service providers. The broadcasters have already started placing orders for the watermarking embedding technology required at their playout centres.”