nanoneo
Contributor
The whole 'if you find a problem with this program please contact BCCC blah blah' is all thanks to the I&B ministry. They want to make the public aware of the existence of a self regulatory body. As if a channel would want to carry such nonsense. Tv censorship in India is terrible as it is. Do people remember how AXN was taken off air in early 2000s?
Also I explained why the TV industry is in the state it is in an earlier post on the first page. However, I realise that I'd forgotten to touch upon the TRP game and the rating system in India. Now TRPs or Television Rating Points are measured by an agency called TAM, which is a subsidiary of the A.C Nielsen group. Now TAM has a absolute monopoly on the rating system. For a brief period there was a rival agency but they didn't fare too well. Now TAM has an inherently flawed system for measuring TRPs. They install boxes in a few households to measure which channel they are watching and for how long. The use this as a sample size and extrapolate the data every week to reach an average. So far so good right? This is how it's measured all over the world. But there is a huge gaping flaw in this method. The sample size for the whole country, we are talking about millions of TV viewers is just around 4,000!
Now why should this matter to any of us? It's simple, since the sample size is so small, having even a few more viewers within that sample size can increase your TRP considerably. That of course means appealing to the lowest common denominator. Any show/channel that fails to do that will get lower ratings. Case in point, shows that air on TLC or History channel or even locally made content on NDTV Goodtimes. There is good content on all those channels but barley anybody within that sample size is watching.
The problem gets worse because most advertisers don't understand TRPs and just want numbers. So, what do you do to increase your numbers? Lowest common denominator
