Students Aid Development of Indian TV Viewing Measures

India's Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), aiming to ensure robust measurement of viewing in the country's 197 million TV homes, and to develop innovative measurement approaches.

BARC took IIT students on summer internships and asked them to suggest possible new methods for channel, content and ad identification, and alternatives to button pushing and the visible meter used in panel homes at present. A jury awarded the Gold prize to IIT Kharagpur's T.Y.S.S. Santosh, for a solution which BARC says 'can potentially transform large conspicuous hardware in panel homes to user-friendly smart assistants, and also reduce dependency on 3rd parties for channel identification'. The winning solutions will be feasibility tested and if proven, integrated with the current system.

BARC India COO Romil Ramgarhia says the country 'faces several unique issues such as power cuts, data connectivity challenges, wide disparity in temperature and climatic conditions etc., all of which impact collection of data'. He adds: 'It thus is important for us to keep innovating and thinking ahead. We are delighted to see the young and bright minds from the most premier technology institute of India coming up with some extra-ordinary solutions. Through this partnership, we also want to encourage students to take technology from research labs to end users, impacting a million lives'.

Final year student Santosh, from IIT Kharagpur said 'BARC India's challenging case study demanded working on inter-disciplinary components of tech that is hardware, software, machine learning and artificial intelligence to propose a new solution to the existing state of the art technology available with BARC India... We are looking forward to work on our proposed technology in a cross functional setup of teams'.

The organisation is online at www.barcindia.co.in .