News Broadcasting
Spice Telecom in expansion mode, launches Kannada Wap portal
BANGALORE: Spice Telecom (Spice) has launched its Kannada Wap portal Kannada Kasturi.com. Times Internet (TIL) supplies content to the portal.
On offer is a collection of polytones, pruetones, singtones, MP3 Tones, videos, animations, wallpapers, videotones and theme downloads in Kannada. Value added services including WAP. IVR, SMS, USSD and MyTunes (CRBT) will also be offered on KK.
Spice CEO Navin Kaul is optimistic about doubling the existing subscriber base of 500,000 in Karnataka in the next 10 months. Spice is present in two circles – Punjab and Karnataka – with an overall subscriber base of 2 million, states an official release. Kaul also revealed Spice’ Karnataka plan to increase the presence from the current 80 towns and cities to another 150.
On a national scale, Spice proposes to bid for all the circles. Spice has now moved ahead of Tata Indicom in Karnataka, up from the last place to number five with the addition of around 150,000 subscribers over the last 5 to 6 months, claimed Kaul during a discussion with this reporter on the sidelines of the press conference.
TIL Mobile Entertainment business head Neeraj Sharma claims that TIL owns rights to over 50000 picture (wall papers) and sound titles from India and around 10000 from across the world, a major portion of which is English. Times of India Director Sanjiv Sethi claims that TIL owns rights to a major portion – almost one third of the almost 2000-3000 titles of Kannada content.
Plans are afoot to create awareness of KK. Spice Karnataka spends around Rs 180-200 million towards its media campaign. National TV ads have been a recent addition in the Spice campaign. A few moths ago spice roped in Bollywood diva Priyanka Chopra as its brand ambassador. JWT looks after the creative business.
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.
