Barc revamps TRP system, news channel ratings to resume from June 11

MUMBAI: India’s television ratings system is getting its most significant overhaul in years. The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) will, from May 30, strip landing pages of their ability to inflate viewership numbers, closing a loophole that broadcasters have exploited for over a decade to game the ratings.

The move is part of the Television Rating Policy 2026, a sweeping revision of audience measurement rules in a country where TRPs directly shape spending decisions in a Rs 2 lakh crore marketing industry.

Landing pages, the default screens that appear when a set-top box is switched on, have long been a favourite tool of news and entertainment channels. Broadcasters routinely purchased forced landing page slots from cable and DTH operators to generate artificial viewership spikes. The practice came to a head during the 2020 TRP manipulation scandal, when several channels were accused of using precisely this trick to rig ratings.

Under the revised framework, those numbers will no longer count.

News channels, which have been frozen out of TRP publication since May 6 on the orders of the ministry of information and broadcasting, will also return to the ratings list from June 11. The ministry had pulled the plug on news channel rankings amid concerns that outlets were chasing sensational coverage of the Iran-Israel conflict to boost scores.

The new policy goes beyond just fixing the landing page problem. BARC will expand its sample base to 1,20,000 homes and, for the first time, introduce cross-screen measurement to capture audiences watching across digital platforms and streaming services, a long overdue acknowledgement that Indian viewers no longer watch television on just one screen.

To ease the transition, BARC has said it will hold webinars for subscribers explaining how the new rules will work in practice.

For an industry that has long known the ratings were broken, the question now is whether the fix will hold.