Seeking a more complete and accurate picture of television viewing habits, direct to home (DTH) operator Dish TV is set to deploy return path data (RPD) technology in its hybrid set-top boxes. The operator has 16 million boxes, out of which 3 million are hybrid oneseligible for RPD measurement.
On the implementation of the new (RPD) technology, Dish TV will be able to gather real time and accurate data on viewing patterns of the customer, across the regions of the country.
This is expected to deal a body blow to BARC’s TV audience measurement data collection.
Currently, BARC data is the measurement matrix for acquiring data across TV channels for the DTH platform.
Dish TV is to make this data available to marketing agencies and also to large corporate houses, the company said, which will “enable them to judge the customer viewership choice accurately and decide on corporates’ advertisement spend on channels.”
Data collected through the technology will essentially be used by Dish TV for its own usage, to understand TV consumption patterns on its platform.
The company said deploying this technology would be “another endeavour to help the industry make better business decisions in this increasingly competitive landscape.
Presently, Malaysia is the only market that is measuring the viewership with RPD and Dish TV’s initiative will be a first of its kind in India.”
Earlier, BARC India was attempting to rope in multi-system operators and DTH operators to scale-up its sample size using RPD technology. Dish TV’s decision to go solo is expected to be a major setback to BARC’s data collection.