MIB strips landing pages from TRP: Industry debates feasibility and warns of pitfalls

New Delhi: On November 6, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting proposed, in draft changes to the TRP guidelines, that landing-page viewership be excluded from television ratings to remove default-tune-in inflation and ensure a level playing field.

Broadcasters say the move is conceptually right but technically complex and potentially disruptive, while the ministry maintains landing pages can continue as a marketing tool and that rating systems can exclude landing LCNs.

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Broadcasters pay cable and DTH operators hefty carriage fees for landing pages, a prime slot that delivers instant exposure, and the practice has shaped TV economics for over two decades.

It became a national flashpoint in 2017 when Republic TV’s rapid rise to No. 1 coincided with heavy landing-page use, prompting rivals to follow suit. The new draft marks the first serious regulatory push to address the issue head-on.

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A top executive working at the intersection of broadcasting and policy said the intent is sound, but the execution is tricky. “There are big technical problems here. Say 150 million people see a landing page for one minute; that’s 150 million minutes. If you remove those minutes from TV viewership, the entire TV ecosystem will collapse. That’s not logical,” the executive said.

The executive argued for a usage rule rather than deleting minutes. He said, “The channel should not run in full on the landing page. The government should simply make a rule: the landing page should only show promo-style communication, like ‘Watch Star Plus’ or ‘Watch Colors,’ along with its channel number. You can use it as a marketing tool, but you cannot run the channel as-is on the landing page.”

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If the proposed amendment is implemented, “the number of landing pages will reduce, and a new ecosystem will emerge,” even as “many players will oppose the ban privately,” said the executive.

An industry veteran who has tracked distribution since the analogue era called the problem “technically complex.” 

“Landing pages keep changing across multiple system operators, depending on who pays. BARC does not detect channel numbers; it only reads the watermark embedded in the content. So, identifying a landing page and excluding its data is not a direct exercise but a statistical estimation,” the veteran said.

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The veteran prescribed, “If the government is serious, the right step is to ban broadcast programming on landing pages altogether. Use them only as Barker pages: informational screens that guide viewers, not broadcast content. That would be a clean and enforceable solution.”

The ministry has maintained that the implementation will be worked out with stakeholders. 

A senior official told BestMediaInfo.com that “rating agencies will be required to devise a system to completely exclude numbers coming from the landing LCN of any cable or DTH operator.”

By way of example, the official said that if a platform earmarks channel No. 100 as the landing LCN, rating agencies will have to identify such LCNs and strip out those minutes from final viewership.

On watermark-based capture, the official added, “With the advancement of technology, this challenge is not big enough to supersede the intent.”

The ministry has invited industry feedback for 30 days before finalising the guidelines.

Landing pages have long been a grey zone, tolerated as paid marketing real estate by some, criticised as manipulative by others.

With MIB now seeking to ring-fence ratings from default tune-ins, both the economics and ethics of visibility are back under the scanner.

As the veteran put it, “Make sure the Barker remains a Barker. Ban programming on the landing page, and the issue ends there.”