GTPL Plans a 50,000-Home TV Measurement Panel

With television ratings publication still frozen, cable operator GTPL Hathway is building its own audience currency. It has switched on a Return Path Data measurement framework across more than 10,000 set-top boxes, with plans to scale to around 50,000 households over the coming months.

01 · From 10,000 boxes to a 50,000-home panel

The panel currently spans over 200 towns and roughly 3,000 PIN codes, drawn from GTPL’s base of more than 11 million active digital TV homes and an estimated 50 million viewers. The baseline study was run by an independent third-party research agency using statistical sampling principles, the company said.

It covers nearly 1,000 channels, including pay and free-to-air, national and regional, satellite and platform-distributed networks. That scale gives smaller and niche broadcasters a window into content performance and audience discovery they rarely see.

• Viewing hours, reach and impressions
• Audience engagement and channel affinity
• Market, region, genre and time-band trends
• Longer-term audience movement and advertising efficiency

02 · Why this matters now

Broadcasters and media agencies are hungry for visibility while the industry-wide ratings currency remains suspended. GTPL’s framework aligns with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Television Rating Policy, 2026, and offers continuous, set-top-box-derived viewing data rather than survey-reported recall.

Its initial data puts average daily linear TV consumption at more than seven-and-a-half hours per household, a reminder of how much linear viewing remains in Indian homes.

03 · The set-top-box advertising angle

GTPL is also measuring its digital properties on set-top boxes and plans to offer inventory on impressions at a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis, similar to digital platforms such as Google and Meta. Privacy safeguards include no personally identifiable subscriber data, household-level aggregation and automated data security, the company said.

04 · What to do with it

Treat this as a directional layer, not a universal TV rating. Ask about sampling composition and extrapolation before relying on it, and test small CPM buys if you want to understand set-top-box ad engagement. The findings will reflect GTPL’s platform and methodology, so they won’t automatically represent all-India viewing.

Source: Indian Advertising Media & Marketing News – exchange4media

Mad About Marketing Desk The strategists and writers at Mad About Marketing, writing up what we see in the work every week.