News Broadcasting
Abhijit Pradhan joins UTV as vice-president
MUMBAI: In tandem with its excecutive rehaul, production house UTV has made a strategic appointment to complete the process of putting the new team in place.
Contract Advertising’s associate vice-president Abhijit Pradhan joins the production major on 1 September as vice-president.
Speaking exclusively to indiantelevision.com, UTV COO Vikas Varma states, “Abhijit is the best as far as strategy planning and implementation is concerned. He is going to be my biggest asset. He will also be key in providing ‘outside the industry creative instigators’ for ensuring creative freshness. He will be a strategic factor in UTV making a paradigm shift from the way a traditional production house operates.”
Channel directors will now be reporting to Pradhan who will be directly reporting to Varma.
Pradhan, who was with Contract for six years, was a brand custodian as well as a founding team member of Core Consulting, which is a marketing/ customer consulting outfit started by Contract Advertising (a member of the WPP group). Cadburys, Godrej and Portico were some strategic accounts that he handled at the agency.
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.
