What is TRP and how is it computed?

I sometimes sit & wonder why is this beautiful world full of stupid people and stupidity. After thinking over the problem of stupidity for some time; I decided to relax and turned on the television. I surfed the channels and found out that almost every news channel had a breaking news. So far, I’ve come across following breaking news:-

1. Shah Rukh Kan’s credit card stolen. [ Believe me, its a ‘breaking news’ on national television! Now India worries about SRK’s stolen credit card!]
2. Stairway to heaven [aka “Swarg Ki Sidhi”]
3. Khali to wrestle in Las Vegas.
4. Man Cheats Death [ This damn channel was showing David Copperfield’s illusions and ‘explaining’ his tricks to the audience.]
5. Ganguly & Dravid out of Pepsi contract [Breaking news? on National TV?]
6. Two snakes getting married in some remote village of India [… yeh, breaking news on national TV!]
7. Rebirth of Kalpana Chawla,

Its the sad story of Indian television & Indian journalism. The news channels do not show ‘news’ anymore. Rather, they’ve become cheap entertainment channels. Everyone says the channels do it to gain the higher TRPs.

What is TRP?

TRP stands for Tevevesion Rating Points. It is a tool that helps find out which television programmes are viewed the most. A device called the 'People's meter' is attached to the TV sets in a few thousand viewers houses for calculating this. These numbers are treated as the sample. The 'People's meter' actually records the time and the programme that a viewer watches on a particular day.

In India INTAM (Indian Television Audience Measurement) is the electronic rating agency which does this work. INTAM uses two methodologies for calculating TRP.

• The first is frequency monitoring, in which 'people meters' are installed in sample homes and these electronic gadgets continuously record data about the channel watched by the family members. 'People meter' is a costly equipment, which is imported from abroad. It reads the frequencies of channels, which are later, decoded into the name of the channels and the agency prepares a national data on the basis of its sample homes readings. But there is a drawback in the technique, as cable operators frequently change the frequencies of the different channels before sending signals to the homes. It may be very misleading to read a channel according to a particular frequency even if the down linking frequency is same all over India.

• Second technique is more reliable and relatively new to India. In picture matching technique people meter continuously records a small portion of the picture that is being watched on that particular television set. Along with this agency also records all the channels' data in the form of small picture portion. Data collected from the sample homes is later on matched with the main data bank to interpret the channel name. And this way national rating is produced. 

Hope this information was of some help to you. If you find more please leave it as a comment.