This is interesting: The Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India is looking to expand its mandate to audience measurement in the digital space. The entity, which does audience measurement on TV, has issued a "Request for Information" with the intent of monitoring audience across media, including the Internet and mobile. BARC measures TV viewing via "BAR-O-meters", which use watermarking for measurement. What they're looking to do At present, the entity is focused on understanding how online video advertising is measured, essentially: "the capabilities of Online Video Advertising and Content measurement techniques with regards to panel and census measurement across video types, devices and platforms." Following this, the entity will issue a Request for Proposal. For the Internet (and Mobile), they're looking to measure: ad breaks in live streams, pre-roll and mid-roll videos, and targeted/addressable advertising linked to the content on broadcaster sites or social media or any other website/apps." Those responding to BARC will need to detail how measurement is done: - How their offerings work. - What types of video, devices and platforms the company is able to measure. - At what level of detail. - Whether the approach requires third party action (eg tagging, encoding or API). MediaNama's take This won't be easy: the distributed nature of the Internet makes it difficult to measure the viewership of videos, and the ability to measure will essentially depend on the willingness of platforms to allow that measurement. Different platforms will also share different level of detail, when it comes to audience.…
