Beyond the Ratings: Reading television’s festive season differently

As Diwali lights up homes across the country, Indian television is closing one of its most unusual festive seasons in recent memory. Every year, the weeks leading up to the festivals are when channels make their biggest bets: new shows, refreshed content libraries and reality formats launched from mid-August, backed by sales packages built for the September-to-November window. This year, those bets were placed without a ratings currency. BARC has suspended ratings across all genres since July under the new Television Ratings Policy 2026. Since then, TV ad activity has dropped 8.6% while digital has grown 24.5%. Apart from cricket and a few popular reality shows, most channels have felt the impact.

The regional space has felt this most keenly. Regional television stayed remarkably resilient through India’s digital boom and is still widely regarded as irreplaceable for reaching audiences in their own language. In these markets, the festive season has always been a great leveller. Strong content gave every broadcaster a fair chance to grow, well beyond the top three players in each genre.

Jaya TV illustrates this well. The well-known Tamil GEC has relaunched its prime-time slate with fresh programming and revived Jackpot, its long-running flagship show, with Khushbu back as host. The response from viewers online has been encouraging, with the channel’s YouTube viewership growing steadily week after week. Yet without current ratings, this momentum remains largely unseen by media plans that still rely on the last four weeks of available data.

Perhaps this is the moment to look beyond a single number. Several useful signals are already available:

• YouTube traction: Viewers increasingly follow their television favourites online. In India, 32% of YouTube users watch film and TV content on the platform. Tamil broadcasters show this clearly: in the last 30 days alone, Sun TV recorded 790.81 million views on YouTube and Vijay Television 621.1 million. A channel’s YouTube growth is therefore a reliable indicator of its on-air popularity.
• DTH-based sampling: Established research agencies already have the infrastructure to capture viewing data from DTH households. Since BARC’s methodology is also built on sampling, this data could offer a dependable interim measure.
• MSO-led ratings: Some leading MSOs have developed their own ratings mechanisms from subscriber viewing data.
• FAST channel inventory: The addressable inventory on FAST platforms offers a measurable view of a channel’s appeal.

None of these is a perfect benchmark on its own.

Read together, with a thoughtful blend of qualitative and quantitative insight, these signals can give advertisers a credible view of a channel’s reach and the growth of its shows. Print, after all, has long shown that advertisers can connect meaningfully with audiences without weekly ratings.

The festive season may be drawing to a close, but it leaves the industry with a valuable lesson to carry forward. Established networks are well placed to manage this phase. For many other broadcasters, however, it is a defining moment that calls for enterprise thinking.

As stakeholders in the same ecosystem, broadcasters, advertisers, agencies and policymakers share an opportunity to build a measurement framework that does not depend on a single mechanism to judge a medium of this scale.

The human side matters too. A possible BARC shutdown could put approximately 1,500 jobs at risk across its wider ecosystem, a reminder that every decision in this transition touches people who have helped build the industry.

Wishing everyone in our television fraternity a very Happy Diwali. May this festival of lights bring prosperity, clarity and renewed momentum to us all.