MUMBAI: The BARC India board is set to meet today in what can be considered as one of its more significant gatherings. The latest board meeting will be held in the backdrop of a series of controversial developments that have been triggered by TDSAT's order setting aside TRAI's directive on landing pages.

The TV audience measurement body's approach post the TDSAT order has raised concerns from certain quarters of the industry. Indiatelevision.com has previously written about different perspectives from within the industry from a clarity and transparency standpoint.

This is the first time the BARC India board will meet since it gave a nod to form a two-member committee to independently review its data validation and outlier policy that has drawn sharp opinions and observations from across the industry.

The meeting comes a day after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) hosted an open house discussion on review of television audience measurement and ratings in Mumbai on Wednesday where senior officials hoped the landing page issue would be addressed by the industry.

Following TDSAT’s ruling, BARC had notified that it would include the ratings of channels placed on landing page in its weekly ratings data and while releasing the data of week 22, 2019 BARC correctly considered the channel available on landing pages.

On 13 June BARC announced that it is reverting to its earlier method of filtering out outliers or abnormal reach from the landing page which BARC decided to do so, only after receiving some representations from industry players.

With BARC again starting to exclude the outliers, several broadcasters have alleged that the data could be biased as the process of validating outliers for channels is manual.

With several industry stakeholders keen to track the latest updates, this BARC board meeting is far from a routine affair.