LAHORE: Speakers at an industry discussion on Wednesday called for an integrated audience measurement system covering television, digital and connected screens, saying fragmented viewership figures no longer presented a true picture of audience behaviour.
They said viewers increasingly shifted between television, YouTube, social media, streaming services and mobile phones, while clips and programmes circulated through WhatsApp and other platforms, making it difficult to determine the actual size and composition of an audience through conventional ratings or individual platform statistics.
The discussion was held by Boltlike Solutions, a Brillanz Group company and Official Audience Intelligence Partner of MADsemble 2026, at a local hotel in Lahore, where the company launched its next-generation audience measurement and intelligence ecosystem covering television, digital and connected TV.
The speakers said television viewership, digital engagement and audiences accessing content through social media and other platforms needed to be assessed collectively to provide a more accurate picture of the audience and help media agencies, advertisers and broadcasters make better decisions.
They observed that a television programme, talk show or drama might be watched on TV by one audience, while its clips or complete segments could subsequently be viewed on various social media platforms. Counting these audiences separately could therefore result in duplication, failing to reflect actual viewing patterns.
Boltlike Solutions CEO Bilal Qureshi said the audience had not disappeared but had moved across screens.
“The challenge is no longer a shortage of data. It is making sense of billions of fragmented audience signals,” he said, adding that the company aimed to move beyond counting ratings, views and followers in isolation towards understanding audiences, what they watched and engaged with, how they overlapped across platforms and where their attention was moving.
Published in Dawn, October 8th, 2026
