MUMBAI: Even 24 months after the TRP scam coming to light, some news channels are still suspected to undertake set up box tampering, said a senior police officer.
Bharatspeaks.com has learnt that some channels, the same ones which were even named in the Mumbai Police FIR in October 2020, may still be tampering with boxes.
The location of the boxes still remains the same and those channels who had access to this confidential information because of their proximity to former BARC India CEO Partho Dasgupta still control the location data.
“Channels which were named in the Mumbai police FIR in 2020 are still under the radar. One of the groups also runs a channel that claims to be the fastest in the country in terms of breaking Hindi news,” a senior Mumbai police official said.
“The two channels named in the Mumbai police FIR may still be doing it as they know the location of the boxes,” said the police official.
The TRP for TV news was suspended in 2020 after Mumbai police unearthed the set-up box tampering racket being undertaken by some news channels including the ones which claim to be Sabse Tez.
How Set-Up Box Tampering Is done
The biggest problem which hurts all three constituents of the advertising ecosystem; Advertisers, Ad Agencies and Broadcasters is panel tampering where some rogue broadcasters artificially induce panel homes to watch a particular channel for an inordinate length of time.
This results in time spent going off the charts and not reach. In such cases, the panel homes are given bigger TVs for actual viewing at home and old TVs are connected to Barometers and tuned to only one particular channel.