TVSA has received numerous queries since the year began about our lack of TAMS coverage and today we are able to bring you the true and unfortunate story about their disappearance.
TVSA has brought the South African public the TAMS on a weekly basis since we began operations in 2006, as it is our belief that as television viewers - and TV license holders - we all have a right to know the numbers, which tell the whole truth and nothing but.
To fill you in on the background
The TAMS have always been calculated by AGB Nielsen, who has measured television in South Africa using peoplemeter technology since 1989.
The research is funded by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), a non-profit industry body made up of all of South Africa's television broadcasters, and the research was managed by the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF) until the end of 2014.
SAARF would upload the weekly audience reports to their website and anyone - TVSA, our friends in the media and even you yourself - could download them on a weekly basis and get all the numbers you needed for select channels, including the free-to-airs. These documents provided Audience Ratings (ARs), which indicated how many people were watching any given show on any given day.
TVSA took this data and using our own proprietary software calculated how much ARs were worth in terms of actual numbers of people watching (eg. an AR of 1 was equivalent to 33,000 viewers). We calculated the Top 10 shows by channel and the Top 5 shows in a wide variety of genres and we published this every week for almost a decade.
TVSA attended every TAMS information day held by SAARF, giving us the ability to update our software constantly to ensure the viewing figures were always correct and that the public was always informed of changes.
BRC replaces SAARF
Last year SAARF was replaced as custodians of the TAMS by the newly-formed Broadcast Research Council of South Africa (BRC), a non-profit industry body that was formed by the NAB to cater to the audience research needs of the radio and television industries.
The contract between SAARF, Nielsen and NAB expired at the end of 2014 and in 2015 the BRC began providing the same documents that used to be provided by SAARF.
BRC imposes crippling fee
In January 2016 the latest TAMS weekly reports were not published by the BRC on their website, meaning we couldn't bring you the TAMS. When we enquired as to their whereabouts we were told that they are no longer (as of 2016) being provided for free.
They are still available to TVSA, our dear friends in the media and indeed even you yourself, but to get them you'll have to pay R50,000 per year. For the exact same documents they used to provide for free. It's a bit of a step up.
When we asked about the whereabouts of the reports we were given the following reply by BRC TAMS technical committee member Janet Proudfoot:
"The BRC embarked on the TAMS DATA SUBSCRIPTION drive last year, where legal contracts have been put together for all software suppliers such as Telmar, Arianna and Techedge who now have to pay for the data to be able to load it into their systems. All these contracts came into effect as at 1st January 2016.
"To this end the BRC legal advisor advised that the BRC cannot sell data on the one hand and then give it away by publishing reports onto the website on the other hand. So, the data that was published throughout the whole of last year will not go up on the website any longer.
"They are also in the process of over-hauling the website and will publish a very limited amount of data on the site. If people want more TAMS data, they would have to pay for such and enter into an agreement with the BRC to do so.
"Basically, they are no longer going to give data away for free."
We sent an email to Setshwano Setshogo, the BRC Research Director, informing him we would not be able to afford R50,000 a year and offered to pay a reduced fee that we could afford. We explained that we (and numerous other media outlets) have been reporting this data for years and said it was in the spirit of transparency.
Setshogo replied that it would not be fair to discount our publication if everyone else has to pay the full cost.
What it all boils down to is that TVSA (and no doubt all other media) have been excluded from the TAMS by a fee that is obviously too exorbitant for any publication to justify as an expense.
And this, dear readers and friends in the media, means the end of transparency in the television ratings measurement business.
The BRC have continued to post a stripped-down, monthly document on their site which is far from ideal. It contains a Top 10 for the month across all channels, which has numerous limitations, for eg. Top 10s are only the Top 10 highest-rated episodes - and not an average.
Generations could have one episode rated higher than Uzalo in a month, but Uzalo could have a much higher aggregate viewership over the month, and Gen would still be the No. 1-rated show. When The Road makes it to 54 viewers, you won't know about it's spectacular rise to the top because it hasn't quite reached the Top 10.
The most dramatic impact will be on the shows that are doing well but that don't make the Top 10 on each channel, because nobody will ever know they are doing well.
In a dynamic environment like TV a monthly report means a lot less than a weekly one, which is how TVSA used to cover it. We'll do our best to bring you TAMS stories based on that incredibly limited data, but gone are the days of full disclosure.
Going forward, ratings data offered by broadcasters and PR houses won't necessarily be accurate, because the information isn't in the public domain and there is no independent source like TVSA who can verify such claims.
So shed a tear with us as we say goodbye to yet another layer of transparency, understanding and goodwill to the South African public. We really did all have the right to know.