As India resets TV ratings, digital’s measurement black boxes loom larger

India’s television ratings blackout has created an unusual paradox for the country’s media industry. Just as the government demands greater transparency, independence, and accountability from television measurement, a growing share of the audience advertisers want to reach is moving into digital environments where the underlying viewing data remains largely controlled by the platforms themselves.

The Television Rating Policy 2026 requires technology-neutral measurement covering connected TVs and television channels delivered through OTT platforms, expands the mandated panel towards 80,000 metered homes and beyond, and introduces independent audits and greater methodological transparency. There is, however, an increasingly conspicuous asymmetry in that demand for transparency. BARC is being asked to expand its panel, disclose its methodology and submit television measurement to independent audits. At the same time, advertising money and viewing are shifting towards digital video environments where the platforms themselves largely control the underlying audience signals, the definitions attached to them and the pipes through which outsiders can access them.

The money is already moving. WPP Media’s TYNY Midyear 2026 forecast expects traditional television advertising in India to decline 6.8% this year to ₹43,600 crore, even as digital advertising reaches roughly ₹73,800 crore.

Put simply, India is demanding greater scrutiny from the measurement system advertisers are moving money away from, while increasingly relying on audience data controlled by the platforms they are moving money towards.

That asymmetry becomes particularly consequential as advertisers try to compare audiences across television, CTV, streaming and other digital-video environments. A common currency is supposed to solve that problem. Building one, however, means taking signals from precisely those proprietary ecosystems, turning the question of platform access and independent verification into the central measurement problem.

For Ali Zaidi, Senior VP - Media at Tonic Worldwide, the threshold must move beyond dashboard-level reporting to event-level data capable of establishing that an exposure occurred, how long it was viewed, on which screen, and against what content or campaign, while allowing privacy-safe deduplication across platforms.

“The data can remain inside Google, Meta or Netflix. The measurement rules cannot,” Zaidi said.

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An API is not an audit

One seemingly obvious solution is greater API access, allowing measurement companies to ingest platform data faster and with more granularity. However, industry executives caution that access should not be confused with independence.

“An API gives you faster access to data. It does not give you independent measurement,” Zaidi said.

If a platform records an exposure, determines what qualifies as a view, filters invalid traffic and ultimately determines what information its API returns, greater API access could improve the speed and granularity of measurement without necessarily making that measurement independently accountable.

Swarali Halepeti, Senior Director - Strategy at dentsu India, argues that platforms do not need to surrender raw user information or proprietary identity graphs for a unified currency to work. Instead, an independent measurement body could prescribe the minimum signals required, receive consistent and auditable feeds and independently calculate the resulting currency.

“The industry doesn't need ownership of platform data; it needs independence from platform defined measurement,” she said.

Across industry responses, those minimum signals are remarkably consistent: impressions or exposures, timestamps, viewing duration, device or screen, content or campaign identity, frequency and completion, alongside privacy-safe identifiers capable of deduplicating audiences.

Shradha Agarwal, Co-founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, adds audience composition and content-level consumption to that list, but says the larger issue remains governance. If platforms alone decide both what information is shared and how it is defined, she argues, the resulting currency cannot be fully independent.

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Not all data is created equal

Even getting platforms to participate does not automatically produce comparability.

Somendu Singh, Chief Contributor at CTV Scale, points to the difference between bulk platform numbers and granular content-level data connected to device identifiers. The latter can help establish audience overlap; aggregated channel or domain figures often cannot.

There is also a more fundamental definitional problem. Television, connected TV and mobile video represent different measurement environments. As streaming collapses distinctions between content, distribution and screen, the industry must decide whether cross-platform measurement is ultimately mapping channels, content or audiences.

From the advertiser’s side, marketing leader Shubhranshu Singh argues that the current numbers are useful for directional comparisons, but not yet sufficient to function as a common currency.

“Platform reported numbers should be independently audited for reach, frequency, deduplication and outcomes before they are used to make major allocation decisions,” he said. “Else, advertisers risk comparing metrics that look similar but are actually measuring quite different things.”

The commercial consequences are significant.

During the 2026 ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, BARC | Nielsen ONE Ads reported less than 10% duplication between television and digital audiences across participating campaigns. The system combines BARC linear-TV data with Nielsen digital measurement across connected TV, mobile and desktop to produce deduplicated reach and frequency.

A finding of that magnitude can materially affect how advertisers allocate budgets between television and digital. That makes the ability to independently reproduce and interrogate such measurements more than an academic concern.

Saying that BARC | Nielsen ONE Ads is a positive start, but JioHotstar was the first participating streaming platform at launch, Zaidi points out, “Until the major platforms participate under the same definitions and audit framework, India has cross-media measurement capability, but not yet a true cross-media currency.”

In any case, without disclosure standards and independent audit rights, Tejas Maha, Associate Director - Media at White Rivers Media, asserts buyers cannot confidently compare or price advertising inventory across different platforms.

“India's TRP 2026 already points this way. If individual platforms control what data is shared, advertisers only receive self-serving metrics and completely lose true comparability,” he says.

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From one black box to several?

The direction is significant: unified measurement need not mean extracting user databases from technology companies. It means creating common rules under which platform signals can be incorporated, validated and compared independently.

Agarwal argues, “The real solution is a common measurement framework with independent audits, clear data standards and sufficient access for third-party verification. That is what will make unified measurement credible, rather than the technology used to collect it.”

India’s new ratings regime can force greater accountability upon companies seeking to measure television audiences. But as television itself increasingly encompasses connected screens, streaming services and digital platforms, fixing BARC addresses only one part of the measurement problem.

As Shubhranshu Singh observes wryly, “Measurement never came in the way of hype.”

The next test is whether the same principle of independent accountability can extend to the platforms absorbing an increasing share of video consumption and advertising. Otherwise, in Zaidi’s words, “We are simply replacing one black box with several bigger ones.”

Netflix declined to comment for this story, while Amazon and JioHotstar had not responded at the time of publishing.