News Broadcasting
Playwin to start with Maharashtra, Karnataka lottery shortly
Spurred by stupendous success of its Playwin Lottery, Subhash Chandra’s Essel group is moving its golden goose to fresh pastures.
A variant of Playwin’s Super Lotto which is under the Sikkim state lottery, will be introduced in the next two months with the state lotteries of the governments of Maharashtra and Karnataka. The coming week will also see corporate tie-ups and co-branding exercises by Playwin, says Playwin marketing vice-president Sanjay Yashroi.
The company is also planning to double the number of its terminals from the present 700 in the next two to three months, says Yashroi. While Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are the strongest states in terms of response to Super Lotto, it’s the five north-eastern states including Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh which are still to catch on, he says. Sikkim itself has only 10 terminals, with eight located in Gangtok itself.
Response to the online lottery has registered an increase of 150 per cent over the base in the nine weeks since it started, says Yashroi. While the first draw drew three million responses, the latest one on 23 May drew 7.5 million responses.
The latest winner of the jackpot of Rs 86.1 million announced yesterday, remains a mystery though. Yashroi claims that the winner is either still unaware of the results or is too overawed to react to the news and hence has not come forward to claim the booty. The online system enables the company to track the winning ticket to the city in which it was sold instantly, but Playwin is not divulging the details till the winner volunteers to collect his prize, Yashroi said.
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.
