TAM Media Research is a joint
venture company
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...
between
AC Nielsen and
Kantar Media Research/
IMRB
Kantar IMRB (formerly IMRB International) is a market research, Statistical survey, survey and Management consulting, business consultancy firm. It is headquartered in Mumbai, India and has operations in over 15 countries. IMRB is a part of the ...
. It is one of the two
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, ...
Audience measurement
Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites. Sometim ...
analysis
firm
A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of people, whether natural, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared ...
s of
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
(the other being
aMap
AMAP is a multiple sequence alignment program based on sequence annealing. This approach consists of building up the multiple alignment one match at a time, thereby circumventing many of the problems of progressive alignment. The AMAP parameters ...
). Besides measuring television viewership, TAM also monitors
advertising
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
expenditure through its division AdEx India. It exists in the PR Monitoring space through another division – Eikona PR Monitor.
The viewership cell runs what is one of the largest
Peoplemeter TV Panels in the World with approximately 30,000 sample individuals representing all the Class-I towns (towns with population more than 100,000) polled every week for their Viewership habits. This division measures television Viewership of audiences for the 300-plus TV stations operating in India.
Monopoly
The company had enjoyed a
monopoly
A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situati ...
in the
television ratings market in India till 2015.
Monopoly Ends
Broadcast Audience Research Council (
BARC India) was being propelled as an alternate TV viewership measurement system to the incumbent, TAM Media Research. TAM, a 50:50 joint venture between Nielsen and Kantar Media, was then responsible for the ratings that decide the fate of the `22,000 crore spending on TV advertising. It enjoyed a virtual monopoly, but its job left a lot to be desired.
BARC India was planned and executed as an alternative to TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd. It was set up as per guidelines of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India.
It is mandated to design, commission, supervise, and own a television audience measurement system for India, and provides Indian broadcast sector with a real-time television rating points (TRP) measurement system.
Here is the inside story of the BARC-TAM deal
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References
{{Reflist
External links
Official website
Research and analysis firms