JioStar chief urges India to restore TV ratings before festive season
India's television industry wants its audience numbers back, immediately.
Kevin Vaz, chief executive of entertainment at JioStar and chair of the FICCI Media and Entertainment Committee, used his inaugural address at the FICCI-Frames conference on 29 September to call on India's Information and Broadcasting Ministry to restore BARC audience ratings at once, according to Variety.
BARC, the Broadcast Audience Research Council, measures what India watches on TV. Its ratings set the currency for advertising, deciding what channels can charge and where brands spend. Vaz warned the data gap leaves broadcasters, advertisers and agencies without dependable numbers heading into the festive season, a key period for ad spending.
The freeze began with news channels. On 6 March, the ministry ordered BARC to stop publishing news ratings, citing sensationalist coverage of the Israel-Iran conflict. In early July, it widened the freeze to all TV genres until BARC secures registration under the Television Ratings Policy 2026, which took effect in March.
BARC applied for that registration on 29 April. It has since expanded its measurement panel to 70,876 homes, against the policy's 80,000-home target, but publication remains suspended.
Vaz also thanked the ministry for scrapping the 10+2 advertising cap, the old rule that limited commercial time to 10 minutes of ads plus two minutes of channel promotions per hour. Restoring ratings is important to ensure stability in broadcasting, he said, according to The Economic Times.
He set the appeal inside wider industry figures. Indian media and entertainment expanded 9% in 2025 to INR2.78 trillion ($28.9 billion), Vaz said, in line with the annual FICCI-EY report. Digital media has now overtaken television as the largest segment, passing INR1.1 trillion ($11.5 billion), while live events jumped 47%.
Connected television, meaning TV sets that stream over the internet, is now a mass habit. Vaz put that audience at more than 200 million viewers, with over 80% of viewing done with family or friends. The 2026 Indian Premier League cricket tournament reached more than 1.2 billion viewers, he said.
What makes this stand out for viewers is the bet on very short fiction. Microdrama, soap-style stories told in episodes of a minute or two for phones, was worth INR6.5 billion ($68 million) in 2025 and is expected to grow at more than 50% a year to 2028, according to Vaz. JioStar has entered the format through Tadka and is working with more than 50 production houses.
FICCI Frames, the industry gathering organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, runs on 29 and 30 September.
