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The Scoreboard Is Dark. Kindly Keep Batting.
· Sharmistha Palui
On 3 July 2000, Star Plus launched two shows on the same evening. One asked ordinary Indians general-knowledge questions for a crore of rupees. The other asked a question no quiz master would dare: could a joint family survive its own daughters-in-law, five nights a week, for eight years?
॥ "Kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi." Because the mother-in-law, too, was once a daughter-in-law.
Ekta Kapoor's K-serials did something no media plan had managed before. They turned prime time into a habit, the habit into a number, and the number into a rate card. Kyunki ran for 1,833 episodes, peaked at a rating of 22.4 and sat at number one for years. Advertisers stopped buying spots and started booking a seat in the living room, somewhere between the aarti and the slap. Take a bow: Indian television has never been sold the same way since.
The peoplemeter became the scoreboard. And once there is a scoreboard, everyone plays for it.
When the number started writing the script
The decline was slow, and then it wasn't. Kindly note the symptoms, issued in public interest.
A/. The same slap, shown three times, from three angles, with thunder.
B/. The dead husband returns after a twenty-year leap, with a new face, because the leap tested well.
C/. A cliffhanger every Friday, so that Monday's ad break had a guaranteed audience.
And, at least once a season, the line every daily has shouted at a wedding mandap:
॥ "Yeh shaadi nahi ho sakti!" This wedding cannot happen.
None of this was bad writing. It was writing for the meter. A show was no longer asked whether it was good, only whether it was "rating". Sensationalism wasn't a creative choice: it was the business model.
The meter could be gamed, too. In 2020 a ratings-manipulation scandal pushed news channels out of measurement for well over a year. In March 2026 the ministry's new ratings rules named an older trick. A channel parked on the screen you land on when you switch the set on was being counted as watched, simply for being there. That viewing will no longer count. Who could have guessed that the channel you never chose was not, in fact, your favourite? Only everyone who has ever held a remote.
The audience, meanwhile, had begun walking out. Many went to streaming apps and found the same disease in a new costume: seasons stretched thin, plots padded for the "next episode" button. The viewer's verdict on prime time sounded a lot like a soap's own favourite threat.
॥ "Aaj se tum mere liye mar chuke ho." From today, you are dead to me.
Buying blind
News ratings stopped in March. By early July, ratings for every genre were frozen. BARC needs a panel of 80,000 homes to qualify under the new policy; at last count it had about 70,876. So India's biggest selling season is going ahead without a scoreboard. Broadcasters are pleading for the numbers to return. Bigg Boss and KBC deals are being signed on last year's form and a firm handshake.
Which leaves the industry asking Kokilaben's immortal question, slightly rephrased.
॥ "Rasode mein kaun tha?" Who was in the kitchen? Or, this festive season: who was in front of the TV?
Nobody can say for sure. The trade calls it flying blind. I'd call it an honesty test. Strip away the weekly number and you find what was holding up most deals all along: last year's habit, a broadcaster's word, a franchise everyone has heard of. The rating never replaced gut feeling. Mostly, it reassured it.
Even the great comeback proves the point. Kyunki returned in July 2025 with its original Tulsi back on set, and by May this year it was still number one on Star Plus. Its rating: 1.6. The original had peaked at 22.4.
And the stadium is shrinking while the lights are off. Linear TV revenue fell 9.2% in 2025, its fourth straight year of decline. Pay-TV homes dropped by about 11 million in a single year. Connected-TV advertising grew 42%, and digital now takes 63% of India's ad spend.
॥ "Hey Maa, Mataji!" Jethalal's cry of despair, now available as a quarterly results summary.
If the TRP never comes back
Here is the question worth asking. Suppose the scoreboard stays dark, or returns so late and so changed that nobody trusts it. How does a channel still get paid? Five models are already sitting in plain sight.
A/. Pay for the property, not the slot. Hum Log, in 1984, was India's first sponsored serial, decades before anyone measured anything weekly. Title sponsorship, "presented by", the product written into the plot: a brand buys a show's world rather than its thirty-second gaps. The future may look a lot like the Doordarshan past.
B/. Pay for outcomes. A QR code on a Bigg Boss task, a festive offer that sells out overnight. A brand trusts the number in its own sales report more than any rating. Expect deals priced on results, with the channel taking a share of the till.
C/. Sell the afterlife. JioStar says five hours of reality TV produce around twenty hours of creator clips. In 2020 a rap remix of Kokilaben's kitchen scene went viral on YouTube, and within weeks the makers confirmed a second season of the show. The clip did what no rating could: it brought a show back from the dead. Licensing and selling ads around that afterlife may soon be worth more than the original slot.
D/. Measure it like digital. Connected TVs and set-top boxes already know what is on screen. Broadcasters are asking for regulation rewritten for the CTV era. Audited, guaranteed impressions sold the way a streaming app sells them would turn a rating into a receipt.
E/. Let the fan pay. Early episodes on the app, ad-free tiers, memberships for the faithful. When advertisers hesitate, the viewer becomes the customer again.
None of these needs a TRP. Every one of them needs a show people actually care about.
So why will anyone wishlist your show?
Here is the uncomfortable bit for digital media. The autoplay trailer that starts the moment you open an app is the internet's own landing page. A three-second "view" is its own inflated TRP. The ministry has just shown what happens when a number stops meaning anything. Kindly note, streaming platforms: your turn will come.
So the brand will come to your office, and the viewer will save your show to her list, for one old-fashioned reason. Not because an algorithm parked it on her home screen. Because it was worth her evening, and she told someone about it the next morning.
A survival strategy for Monday morning, then, for anyone who plans media or makes content. Stop asking how many people watched. Ask three better questions. Did they come back? Did they talk? Did they buy? A show that scores on even one will survive any blackout. A show that scores on none was only ever surviving on the scoreboard.
Television's golden era was never built on ratings. It was built on stories people rearranged their dinner around; the ratings simply followed. The scoreboard is dark for now. Good teams keep batting... and the crowd always knows who is playing the game and who is playing to the camera.
॥ To be continued.