News Broadcasting
China to start mobile TV trial in 2007
MUMBAI: China will begin trial broadcasts of mobile television by mid-2007.
The digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) technology will be tested next year and a satellite system will be activated in the first half of 2008 so that the Olympic Games can be broadcast to mobile-phone users across the country, China Daily reports.
The country’s two biggest mobile telecom operators, China Mobile and China Unicom, are expected to sign agreements with phone makers by the end of the month to buy TV handsets.
Besides mobile phones, big-screen personal digital assistants (PDAs) and MP4 players will also be able to receive TV signals, Yang Qinghua, director of the television division of the SARFT’s Broadcast Science Research Institute, was quoted in the report as saying.
The mobile-phone TV market in China is estimated to reach $756 million by 2008. China is the world’s biggest mobile phone market with 426 million mobile phone users and in the next five years, about eight per cent of them are expected to subscribe to the mobile TV service, the Chinese government estimates.
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: 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.
