News Broadcasting
Woes aplenty weigh the business down
MUMBAI: CNBC’s “The Entertainment Industry: Taking The Big Leap” brainstorming session held on 19 December in Mumbai, offered some insights into why films and the music industry had fared badly in the year 2002. Here, we present some of the participant’s views.
SET India CEO Kunal Dasgupta pointed out that films depicted the social values of the existing times. He added that it was likely that today’s film makers were slow to pick up the changes in modern society and highlight them through the medium of cinema.
Due to these reasons, Dasgupta felt that the film makers were not connecting with the audiences. However, he mentioned that film-based programming has the highest share of TV programming. Since the consumers paid less than $3 for watching TV, they were being served with unoriginal fare except for certain categories like news and sports.
Producer Mukesh Bhatt, who was part of the audience, squarely put the blame on video piracy. He mentioned that his success could be attributed to the fact that he believed in ‘manufacturing glamour without being a victim of it.’ He claimed that high entertainment tax rates possibly where proving a dampener. He additionally blamed cheap Chinese VCD players for the crisis which has led to the penetration of cheap pirated VCDs down the population starta.
KPMG entertainment business head Rajesh Jain claimed that the lack of creativity, innovation and slick presentations were affecting the content.
Reliance Entertainment chairman Amit Khanna felt that the film industry had a higher propensity to propel doom in the 21st century ‘Attention Economy’ wherein films emulated products and services in vying for the attention of the consumers. Amit Khanna blamed the lack of professional marketing and promotions.
Khanna calculated a revenue of Rs 46 billion in box office for the industry per annum. However, the reported figures of Rs 30 billion indicated that there was serious misappropriation.
Manoj Desai, who owns several theatres and has produced many films, blamed it on desperate producers who flooded the markets with prints in order to capitalize on a high initial draw during the first few days. He also mentioned that the budgets of the current films were being boosted up unnecessarily.
Music industry woes:
Saregama India’s VP – A&R Atul Churamani mentioned that the music industry had taken the highest hit due to the box office debacles. He also mentioned that the popularity of FM radio had resulted in a 30 percent decline in audio sales. He added that the crux was the matter lay in the fact that excess music was available for free.
A CNBC report stated that the music industry still depended on the film industry; around 65-70 percent of the content was still sourced from films. He also mentioned that the global system of music publishing rights could be adopted in India.
A Saregama representative added that an ordinary CD cost Rs 40 and has content (recorded songs) that cost the music industry millions in terms of acquisition of music rights. She added that Saregama had lost a huge proportion of their entire archives of old Hindi film songs to the grey market.
A major hurdle was the high licence fee that constituted 65 percent of the operating costs. He added that the industry had created opportunities where none existed: capitalising on the situation where the markets were flooded with cheap imports.
Lack of creativity in entertainment:
TV serial director Nupur Asthana blasted TV channels by claiming that TV channels were the masters at stifling creative thinking and content. She lamented the fact that every channel claimed to know what the audiences wanted. She added that the audiences were subjected to what the channel wanted to show rather than getting a chance to decide what they wanted to see.
Ex-Sony Entertainment programming head and independent producer Rekha Nigam claimed that the audiences today seemed to be affected by the “I don’t know what I but I want it now” syndrome. She added that entertainment was not a formula. It had to be driven by sheer passion. She added that the film writers were worse than the TV serial writers.
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.
