Respondent Level Data: Not worth the hype?
Industry experts tell e4m that RLD has received a lukewarm response from broadcasters who feel it is not very user-friendly
Days after allowing unrolling of the viewership data for the news & niche genres, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) earlier this week took a u-turn asking BARC to wait on it till further discussion. Sources told e4m that the ministry has asked the ratings agency to give a presentation to it on the matter.
While the ministry may have stalled the unrolling, the Respondent Level Data (RLD), it seems, has anyway failed to create much of an interest among broadcasters. Industry experts tell e4m that the much-hyped data set, which was rolled out on October 12, has received a lukewarm response from television channels. Several broadcasters are now questioning the utility of RLD as, according to them, it is being provided in a format that is not very user-friendly.
The data is of not much use in the format that it is shared, said an industry source, explaining that it is not being shared within the YUMI software.
Respondent Level Data is being provided in three component parts every week: Demographic Files, Viewership File and Playout File.
According to the source, the data is being provided in two formats; one half is in excel files and the other is in JSON file. "But the JSON files cannot be used as it is, it needs processing. And hiring people to decode these files will only add to our expenditure,” said the source.
According to another senior industry executive, the data that is being shared has channel ID and programme ID, which makes it difficult to read it. “Decoding these IDs would mean additional effort. We are not sure if we would want to do it,” he added.
“We are already paying Rs 15 lakh for this data, why should be spend additional money for then using it,” asked another industry source.
The Respondent Level Data, which has outlier exclusion, is being given to broadcasters at a price of Rs 15 lakh per annum. Earlier, only agencies had access to this data at a cost of Rs 60 lakh per annum.
According to BARC, RLD is the final validated viewership and has demographic details of each panellist which is aggregated in YUMI in order to produce the final published audience estimates. The data enables end-users to link a particular panellist, or group of panellists, to understand how their viewing may have evolved over time with respect to a channel, or their competition. This will be possible since they will have the ability to view the viewership details, panellist by panellist, at a minute-by-minute level.
