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MUMBAI: After much drama and negotiations over the last few days, India will get its first television viewership data from the digital viewership with news being masked under the 'Others' category. TAM Media Reseach, which had suspended the release of the data from 7 October, will unveil it on Monday morning.

The agreement between the three industry bodies - Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), Advertising Agencies of India (AAAI) and Indian Society of dvertisers (ISA) -was reached today morning.

"TAM data will be released on Monday, 24 December around 10 am," a TAM spokesperson said. "The data for news channels will be reported in Others category which includes religious and shopping channels." The data will be for the week ended 41-50, 2012.

The industry bodies could not reach an agreement on when release of data would resume for individual news channels. "We are still in discussions with the news channels and have not arrived at any consensus.

As already reported, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA) has agreed that TAM resume reporting of viewership data from 9 January, including for individual news channels. For the period since 7 October, no individual news channel data be reported. However, other industry bodies are yet to give their consent to the proposal and no final decision has been made yet.

Earlier on Friday, TAM had said in a statement on its website that, "At the request of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and in concurrence with the ISA, AAAI and IBF, data of news channels is being withheld. From week 41 of 2012, data for news channels for all markets will be aggregated with 'Others'."

Accordingly, TAM was to release the later on Friday but decided it would first want to have "quick" consent letters from individual news channels (including members of NBA) stating their agreement with their channel's viewing being clubbed into the category of 'others'. Others category includes lesser viewed channels like religious channels and shopping channels.

TAM had suspended ratings of all genres from 7 October after an agreement with AAAI, ISA and IBF. It was to release data for the nine-week period of suspension on 19 December, but was asked by the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry to not resume reporting television ratings on the prodding of NBA.