Media Forum: Is Barb keeping up with digital?(Broadcasters' Audience Research Board Ltd.)

Can Barb meet the changing needs of the new media landscape, Alasdair Reid asks.

Barb is 25 years old this week. Happy Birthday. It has been a lively old quarter-of-a-century. When Barb took over from the previous television audience measurement system, Jictar, back in 1981, there were only three UK television channels.

ITV and BBC1 tended to have rather polite scheduling policies designed to keep heavy-hitting programmes from clashing. And ITV's biggest hitter of all, Coronation Street, had a supremely easy time of it - as EastEnders hadn't yet launched, it was the only peaktime soap on British television.

The Barb years have seen mind-numbing change, starting with the launch of Channel 4 in 1982 and accelerating with the advent of Sky and multichannel satellite TV in 1989.

We've not only seen the rise, fall and obsolescence of the video recorder, but are now witnessing the demise of its partial successor, the DVD player. By the end of the decade, television will be delivered via the internet to be stored on the hard drives of devices descended from computers rather than TV sets. Viewing on mobile devices could also be widespread.

Over the years, the Barb organisation has had its critics, not least when attempts to upgrade the panel size, or measure more sophisticated phenomena such as time-shifted viewing, have gone awry - 1991 and 2002 were not vintage years.

But since the latter of those two debacles, when it upgraded in rather shambolic fashion to the current panel size of 5,100 households, Barb has steadied the ship and has attempted to become more forward-thinking, instigating, for instance, a consultation process with the advertising industry called 'Future into View'.