News Broadcasting
News Corp to launch business channel later this year
MUMBAI: News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch says that his media conglomerate plans to launch a more ‘business-friendly’ business channel in the US than its rival CNBC.
The Fox Business Channel will launch in the fourth quarter in at least 30 million homes.
The channel, which will directly challenge CNBC for domination in the small but lucrative financial news market, will be developed and overseen by Fox News Channel/Fox Television chairman and CEO Roger Ailes.
Reports state that the business channel will be housed along with Fox News at the News Corp. headquarters in New York. It will have initial distribution across the US, including New York, with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Charter and DirecTV.
The project has been in the works for several years, and the company was waiting for distribution to be in place.
Murdoch claims that CNBC is often too negative and focussed on financial scandals. He sounded a note of confidence by saying that CNBC would copy a lot of things that the new channel would do.
Meanwhile, Murdoch also said that over 10 per cent of the media company’s sales will likely come from its digital businesses, from Internet to cell phones, in the next five years.
The view excludes Internet properties owned by its local newspapers, such as the New York Post’s NYPost.com site, whose split of digital revenue could well go higher
Revenue from sites including MySpace are expected to account for about 2 per cent of News Corp’s fiscal 2007 sales.
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.
