Kantar Media has secured a multi-year audience measurement contract in partnership with Tata Sky, one of India’s fastest growing Direct to Home (DTH) TV providers. The company will measure the behaviour and viewing habits of Tata Sky’s rapidly increasing number of pay TV subscribers.
The service, launching later this year will take full advantage of Kantar Media’s return path data technology – RapidView – to collect complex audience data directly from set top boxes and provide insights into subscriber behaviours not easily captured elsewhere.
Kantar Media will have overall responsibility for setting up and operating the service and will be closely supported in the local market by IMRB, India’s leading market research agency providing panel recruitment and management services. Data will be collected from an opt-in panel chosen from Tata Sky’s subscriber base. An additional panel will be used to monitor those homes with High Definition (HD) televisions. Viewing data will be captured across all the ways in which Tata Sky customers are able to view TV (including live, time shift, on demand and interactive). Data from the service will be made available to Tata Sky using Infosys+, the leading edge TV analysis software platform developed by Kantar Media.
Nicola Bamford, Chief Content and Business Development Officer at Tata Sky said, “We are excited about launching this service in India in collaboration with Kantar Media and IMRB. The insights that will be available to us will help us to stay at the forefront of the Pay TV business in India.”
Nick Burfitt, Global Director for Return Path Data, Kantar Media Audiences, commented, “Pay TV is showing incredible growth in India and Tata Sky is a leading company in this market. We are delighted to have been chosen to develop and deploy this ground-breaking service, the first of its kind in this important market. The new service will provide real insights into the viewing habits of subscribers and we look forward to working with Tata Sky further as the service develops.”
Kantar Media has been operating audience measurement services for set-top box operators around the world since 2005 and is the acknowledged thought leader in the successful deployment and research techniques using return path data. The partnership with Tata Sky is the latest addition to existing services operating in the USA, UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand with data being processed from many millions of set-top boxes each day