TV Ratings

TV Ratings are determined from the data collected from sample viewers.

Ratings: TRP(TV Rating point) is percentage of TV users watching a show out of total TV users at one point of time. TRP is reported as rating points/share. Share is the percentage of viewers of one show among the people viewing any channel at the same point of time.

TRP 9.0/15 for a show means 9 out of 100 TV owners are watching the show, and 15 out of 100 TV viewers at that time are watching the show. In a sample of 100 TV owners, 9 people are watching the show and 51 people are watching other shows and 49 people are not watching any show. See the ratio  9/(51+9) = 15.

GRP(Gross rating points) is averaged sum of all TRP numbers across all channels for some advertisement. Reaching 100 GRP is target of an advertising campaign.

Sample selection: Agency selects random people as part of sample based on some criteria. National readership survey document that lists user geography, access patterns and income groups is used in India. Selected people have choice to opt out and sometimes they will be given small monitory gifts for participating.

Methods to collect: Dairies, people's meters, picture collectors, SMS messages, cable and tivo software.

Methods to report: Hand tally, automated by software or mixture of techniques.

Dairies: Agency sends dairies to people log the channels and viewers on daily basis. Agency represenatatives collect dairies on weekly or monthly basis from people and manually prepare survey results.

People Meters: People's meters will be installed near the TVs at selected homes. They monitor the channel frequency and stores the information. Collection is done periodically by humans or by remote server on dailup connection. Some cable operators may change frequencies of individual channels and so it may cause discrepencies.

Picture Meter: Meters also record signals of picture for small durations so that they can be matched with channels later by humans.

Indian TV rating agencies: TAM (Television audience measurement,), also called as INTAM, a joint venture of Neilson's Media and Kanter Media provides weekly results based on some six thousand people meters. DART(Doordharshan audience ratings) is dairy based system used by Doordharshan to measure audience. Daily reports are provided by aMap(Auidence measurement and Analytics Private Limited) using daily automated collection of results from people's meters.

Foreign agencies: Neilson's Media and Arbitron in USA and BARB (British Audience Research Board) in United Kingdom are few to list.

Statistics: Number of channels in India is around 300. Indian ad market is $2B worth and advertising market in USA is $150B, and growing at the annual rate of 15%. Number of household TVs are 100 million is USA and 70 million in India.

Reference Links:
* TRP contentious rating and history.
* aMap offers real time data.
* Ratings in USA: Nielson's Media TV Ratings.
* Ratings in UK: British Audience Research Board.