Can television ever have a single currency again?

The timing could hardly be more ironic.

Just as India's television industry grapples with the future of Connected TV (CTV) measurement (with CTV households expected to cross 50 million this year), it has temporarily lost the one planning currency it has relied on for decades. The suspension of BARC ratings has sparked immediate concerns over campaign planning, pricing and media buying. Beyond the immediate disruption, however, lies a bigger question extending well beyond the current blackout.

In a world where viewers move seamlessly between linear television, Connected TV, streaming platforms and digital video, can television still rely on a single planning currency?

While long the industry standard, BARC's Television Rating Points (TRPs) were never perfect. But they gave agencies, broadcasters and brands something arguably more valuable than precision: a common language. Agencies, broadcasters and brands could plan campaigns using the same benchmark, even if they occasionally disagreed with the numbers themselves.

Connected TV has fundamentally changed that equation. Unlike linear television, CTV doesn't merely introduce another screen. Instead, it introduces multiple independent sources of audience data, each with its own methodology, incentives and definition of success. 

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Rather than replacing TRPs with another common currency, Connected TV has produced multiple competing versions of audience truth.

That fragmentation has triggered an increasingly important debate across the industry. The question is no longer simply how CTV should be measured. It is whether television should even aspire to a single measurement currency anymore.

The case for a common language

The industry's challenge is no longer measuring television in isolation. It is measuring audiences that increasingly move seamlessly between linear television, Connected TV and digital platforms.

“As audiences continue to move seamlessly across screens, the industry needs measurement that reflects the way consumers watch television today,” says Anil Goel, Global CTO at Nielsen.

According to Goel, advertisers are increasingly looking for greater transparency as audiences fragment across apps, devices and services. Looking ahead, he argues, television measurement will need to move beyond traditional reach and frequency metrics by combining cross-media audience measurement with richer content intelligence that gives brands visibility into the programming surrounding every impression.

“Bringing together audience insights with content-level transparency will help brands plan with greater confidence, optimise investments across platforms, and unlock the full potential of Connected TV as it becomes an increasingly important part of the media mix,” he says.

That philosophy is already beginning to influence how agencies think about television planning.

“As viewers spread across linear TV, streaming apps and mobile, measuring platforms separately makes it impossible to see the bigger picture,” says Tejas Maha, Associate Director – Media at White Rivers Media. “We need a cross-media standard that counts people accurately across all screens.” He believes advertisers ultimately need a unified framework around total reach and frequency, even if achieving industry-wide consensus remains difficult.

The underlying argument is simple. Television may be evolving, but advertisers still need a common planning language to compare investments across platforms.

Brands, meanwhile, appear less concerned with preserving legacy measurement systems than ensuring they reflect how audiences actually consume media. “India needs a 'single view of the consumer' rather than a 'single view of the screen,”  says Vipin Yadav, Vice President and Head of Marketing at DriveX. While he believes the industry still needs a common currency, he argues it must evolve beyond traditional reach metrics to incorporate audience quality, attention and business outcomes. 

Why CTV refuses to fit the old mould

Russhabh Thakkar, Founder and CEO of Frodoh, believes the industry is trying to force a household medium into an individual measurement framework.

“The Smart TV in your living room does not know who is watching. Forcing CTV into mobile's tracking mould distorts the reality of the medium entirely,” he says.

The bigger challenge, according to Thakkar, lies in attribution.

“The real CTV story is not the impression on the big screen. It is what happens after. A household sees a brand's ad on a FAST channel, then searches for it on their phone an hour later. That journey is where the performance signal lives,” he says, adding that stitching those interactions together in a privacy-safe, standardised way remains one of the industry's biggest infrastructure gaps.

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For now, he argues, the industry's immediate priority should not be sales attribution but deduplicated incremental reach.

“You cannot jump to outcomes before you standardise reach,” Thakkar says, arguing that understanding how many genuinely new households a campaign reaches provides a common bridge between traditional TV planners and performance marketers.

That view is not universally shared.

Pratham Hegde, Co-founder and Business Head at Truelift.ai and a former member of BARC's working committee on single-source panels, believes advertisers should move beyond audience metrics altogether and focus on business outcomes.

“In the absence of infrastructure to link user-level TV viewership data to sales conversions, the only way to measure TV impact is through experimentation and advanced machine learning methods,” he says. Those techniques, he argues, allow marketers to isolate television's incremental contribution by studying changes in impressions, sales patterns and customer behaviour across channels.

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For Hegde, the goal is not to find another universal currency but to understand television's unique contribution to the marketing mix. “TV is measurable, the trick is to measure exactly what it is doing that other media cannot.”

On the other hand, Tyler Loechner, VP of Platform Growth at Pixalate, believes the answer lies somewhere between those two positions. Rather than abandoning the idea of a common framework, he argues the industry should rethink how that framework is built.

“The single-currency model made sense when television meant one screen, one signal, and one measurement framework. That world no longer exists,” he says. Instead, he argues, measurement should increasingly rely on “open, signal-level data rather than panel projections or closed data partnerships.”

One currency, or many?

Looking ahead, Loechner believes advertisers will demand much greater transparency than conventional TV ratings ever offered. “Consumer reach at the show and channel level, not the app level,” will become one of the industry's non-negotiable measurement layers, alongside screen-size verification and invalid traffic measurement, as Connected TV buying becomes increasingly programmatic.

Somendu Singh, Chief Contributor, CTV Scale, says that slowly but gradually, market forces and the sheer volume of ad spend will compel the ecosystem to converge, proving that a single, unified standard is both practical and highly desirable for the industry's future. “Until a single currency arrives, the more realistic path is to lean on what already exists closer to the ground: device-level and content-level data tied to IP, which reflects actual viewing far more accurately than legacy panel-based estimates ever could.”

For decades, television buying was built around a single planning benchmark. Connected TV has transformed television from a relatively unified medium into a collection of platforms, devices and data ecosystems, each generating its own version of audience truth.

The BARC disruption may eventually fade, but the questions it has exposed are likely to outlast it. As audiences continue to fragment across linear TV, Connected TV and streaming, the industry's challenge is no longer simply replacing TRPs with another number. It is building a planning language that reflects how people actually consume television today.

Whether that ultimately becomes a single currency or a framework built on multiple complementary metrics remains an open question. What is increasingly clear, however, is that television can no longer be measured as though it lives on a single screen.