Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology subsidiary of Prime Focus Limited, one of the global leaders in media and entertainment industry services, today announced that the Indian Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has contracted it to offer play-out monitoring service to power one of the world’s largest audience measurement programs.
PFT’s globally proven CLEAR Media ERP platform bolstered with next generation content identification technology and Digital Services will help automatically generate play-out monitoring reports on a daily basis.
“It is a great honour to be selected by BARC, and we consider it equally a great responsibility towards the industry,” said PFT founder and CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan
in a statement. “India has one of the largest TV ecosystems in the world and the audience measurement system ought to be highly credible. We look forward to working with BARC to help build India’s very own, trusted rating service.”
Audience measurement data is the de facto currency for media industry, being widely used by all stakeholders for planning, pricing, selling and buying advertising inventory on the medium. PFT will offer a robust play-out monitoring service which will check the actual telecast of each channel, capture the content at every point in time, and help link it back to the rating piece of the audience measurement system.
“With PFT on board we are one step closer to our mission of indigenously building a television audience measurement system that is better than the best in the world,” said 
BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta. “PFT’s world class technology, deep understanding of Indian broadcast and advertising industry and across the board relationships with broadcasters and advertisers as a neutral partner made them the perfect choice for this critical role.”
India has 154 million TV households making it the third largest TV market in the world, next only to China and the US. This will be the first fully digital play-out monitoring service employed directly by the Indian broadcast industry and is scheduled to commence operations in October 2014.