News Broadcasting
Mummy helps HBO climb into the top 100
An HBO movie made it to the top 100 programmes in the week ended 13 January 2002, setting a record of sorts for the channel.
Mummy, the Hollywood blockbuster of 2000, entered both ORG Marg’s Intam list and AC Nielsen’s TAM data with Intam ranking it 28th with a TVR of 2.6. TAM on the other hand, gave it a higher rating of 2.88 but placed it at number 62 on its chart. The reason for the difference is that TAM data records a show’s TVRs according to the number of times it is on air during the week, while Intam registers one show on any given time slot only once, however many times it may appear. The data collected was for all C&S homes in all 24 panels.
Mummy, aired on 12 January, was touted as the channel’s first big movie of the year and was surrounded by a lot of on and off air promotional activity. The ratings by themselves are impressive. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that premiered on AXN in December 2001 earned a rating of 1.2 among Indian cable AB viewers in the top five metros, making it the top programme on international channels between 1 and 29 December, according to AXN Asia MD Todd Miller. Mummy thus stands head and shoulders above the other English channels.
Nevertheless, Mummy was not able to break Titanic’s record score of 8.2 (TAM data for nine main cities 4+) when the movie premiered on Star Movies on 31 December 1999.
The Mummy seems to have succeeded where the Band of Brothers failed, for HBO. The 10 part miniseries BoB was pushed aggressively across media but failed to strike a chord with viewers, and rise on the ratings scale. Mummy has turned out a much sounder investment for the channel.
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.
