1. BARB
1)What is BARB?
2)How does it collect data?
3)Why is barb useful to TV production
companies and schedulers?

2. What is Barb and how do they collect
data?
• The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB)
• Supplies official viewing figures for the audience of UK
television.
• They pay research companies such as Ipsos Mori, Kanter
Media and RSMB for their services.
• Private homes are used for their research, they’re carefully
selected.
• They gather data which represent the television viewing
behavior of the UK’s 26 million TV households.
• They collect their data by selecting 5000 homes for the
censes, which represent the whole of the country, so it
matches the broad democratic of the UK. They give them a set
top box. They also might pay for these peoples TV license.

3. Eastenders went from having 15 million viewers on June 7th to
June 10th 1999 to having 8 million on the week of June 2nd to
June 9th. There are many factors behind this, the most obvious
and most significant factor is that nowadays the shows and
channels which are available for people who have TV’S are much
more in high numbers then there was in 1999. This impacts the
amount of viewers because nowadays there are more likely
going to be shows that are on at the same time as Eastenders
which are as good or even better then Eastenders. Also
teenagers and young adults have other media platforms such as
game consoles (ps4) and social media websites like twitter which
they use. Meaning that television have to compete with these
media platforms, which in some cases leads to the shows losing
viewers because of the popularity of these other media
platforms.

4. Why Barb is useful for TV schedulers and TV
productions?
• Barb is useful for TV schedulers because once the data is gathered,
TV schedulers could see when most people are active on their
televisions, this will enable them to get more companies wanting to
advertised and be broadcasted at popular times. They’re also useful
as the results show whether TV shows are being watched, this helps
TV schedulers and productions because they’ll be able to identify if
there are any shows which are highly unpopular. They'll know
whether they’re wasting money on certain shows.
• The benefit for TV productions is that they’ll be able to see from
the results what shows are popular, for example if soup operas are
popular, TV productions could focus on making or buying soup
operas which will reach out to a large number of audience
members.