MUMBAI: Star TV has partnered with TVision, a company which measure actual eyes on screen attention providing advertisers, agencies and television networks with the second-by-second data required to understand the effectiveness of television advertising and programming. The company would mostly be focusing on major sports shows on Sony Pictures Network (SPN) India’s and Star India’s sports cluster for the pilot run of the service.

According to TVision co-founder and CEO Yan Liu, TV still plays a very important role in India and the market is growing quickly. “Usually the advertising spends accounts for 1.5-2 per cent of the GDP no matter which country, but the GDP of India is growing quickly. On top of that the consumer is adapting to new formats like OTT very quickly,” he says.

He thinks that the Indian market is very interesting and has high potential and wants to continue to invest in the Indian market, partnering with Star TV to launch the service by early 2019 in the country.

Liu says, “In pretty much every market, as a Nielsen, Kantar IMRB and BARC India, they run TV rating service but for us, rating service is more like a quantity. It’s how many TVs tune in to that show. It is important, but let’s be honest, when we talk about TV, a lot of time we are not really watching the screen, we are doing something else. So the other part of the formula we think is audience attention. If you are a brand and spend money on the TV, ultimately you want to make sure that you have audience attention.”

Liu points out that if you just want to measure the tune-in on screen that’s only half of the formula, which is quantity. You also need to understand the quality of the show which is attention. That is why they think that the service is complementary to BARC India. It’s on top of what BARC India offers. BARC  can capture quantity and their attention index can be used side-by-side with the TV rating.

“In the US and Japan, the technology has grown from HD then 4K and 8K. What we found was that the higher quality of content leads to higher engagement of the show. So we think that this is a very big thing for big TV networks like Star TV that continues to push HD channels,” he adds.

The testing of the product has started with Star TV and overall there is no issue apart from some technical challenges like non-stable electricity. As the product is in testing the sample size is very small of just a couple of hundreds. The product will kick off by launching in Mumbai and New Delhi.

“For the live TV, 80 per cent of the top rated shows are sports already in the US. So for the live TV, we definitely believe that sport is going to be the strongest genre. Brands will also benefit from the technology as they will get to engage with a highly attentive audience to make sure they are commercially effective,” he concludes.