Barb out of step with viewers
By Kate Bulkley
For Broadcast June 10, 2010
Response to criticism of its new panel seems to favour status quo.
Two months ago, I wrote about Barb relaunching its panel in January. I cited comments from multichannel executives that suggested the supposedly improved panel was “flawed”, with audiences of some of the smaller channels changing by as much as 350% from the old panel to the new. Needless to say, Barb chief executive Bjarne Thelin didn’t agree and invited me in for a chat.
Asked about the huge shifts that some channels have seen, he cited everything from the bad weather early in the year to new channel launches (particularly in the food category), to the perennial problems of tracking audiences of music channels. “We report 300 channels and very few have reported a drastic change. The order of things hasn’t changed,” he summed up.
But Thelin does admit that the profile of TV viewers has shifted in the new panel, so many multichannels have many more C, D and E viewers than before (not good when you are trying to sell advertising).
Thelin says this is because Barb is capturing more viewing overall, with more meters on more TV sets in the panel homes. Does that mean TV is moving downmarket? “Our aim is to deliver the best panel representation, not to produce the same results as the last panel,” Thelin said.
But what does this say about the accuracy of the last panel? And what does a channel do if it suddenly has a smaller audience and fewer ABC1s? Barb is deservedly credited in the TV and ad industries as the gold standard. But someone, somewhere should be giving the industry more comprehensive figures that better reflect the fragmented TV universe we are all living in.
Asked why the new panel seems so out of step with “new” technology, Thelin said: “Our original spec for the new contract was far more wide-ranging than we were able to commission, because we have to deliver a currency for the industry that is understood and compatible with what has gone before.”
Goodness gracious. So the webification of TV is happening, and Barb has been doing a lot of thinking about the realities of how people are consuming TV, but the new panel still only tracks TV viewing. Maintaining the status quo seems to be what Barb’s biggest stakeholders - the major commercial channels - want. But the niche TV channels are being under-served and the likes of YouTube, MSN, Yahoo! and any site with lots of video are not even part of the conversation.
Work on the new 5,100-home Barb panel began in 2007 and it is only now launching a six-month trial tracking TV viewing on PCs, with results expected in early 2011. Meanwhile, iPlayer is on version three, with links to other broadcasters’ content on their own sites.
Perhaps Barb’s problems will be solved as web-connected TVs take off, with every manufacturer from Sony to Samsung launching them this Christmas. Barb has been talking with the Digital Television Group (DTG) about a specification for a data feed out of connected TV equipment, so it can report the source of the signal. There is a committee, but no sign of a spec yet.
In the meantime, Barb figures should better reflect the current state of the TV-watching nation - and fast.