News Broadcasting
IOL Broadband to soon offer 3 main bouquets on IPTV
MUMBAI: IPTV service platform IOL Broadband has announced that it is set to offer the three main channel bouquets available in India – Star, Set-Discovery OneAlliance and Zee Turner – totaling to over 60 Premium Pay IPTV channels along with 90 free-to-air channels.
The announcement comes ahead of IOL’s “imminent” commercial deployment of IPTV in the country.
This represents a watershed event in that a credible option to CAS & DTH has now become available for the first time in India, the company asserts.
Company director AS Oberai said that with the introduction of commercial services by IOL IPTV on fibre and ADSL networks; India has joined an elite club of developed countries like Japan and Korea where IPTV has been recently introduced.
IOL is deploying IPTV all over the country after integrating proven technology providers, a company release states.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
