News Broadcasting
One in five digital households in the UK are FTA: ITC
LONDON: This could be the way India goes in a post-CAS environment – free to air channels leading growth in the satellite TV market. Multichannel and digital TV penetration are estimated to have increased to 48.6 per cent and 43.9 per cent of UK households respectively.
Free-to-air digital services (including both free-to-air digital terrestrial and satellite) have accounted for 60 per cent of the growth in the UK digital TV market since the launch of Freeview, This data is contained in the International Television Commision’s (ITC) latest Multichannel Quarterly report. The data implies that one in five digital households are now free-to-air.
Overall the increase in digital penetration over the last quarter (January – March 2003) was attributable to the following key developments:
– Digital Terrestrial Transmission (DTT) showed substantial growth over the quarter reaching 1.6m DTT households
– Sky has added more than 143,000 paying subscribers, leading the pay TV market with 6.4 million UK households
– Cable also contributed to the growth in digital penetration by adding over 56,000 digital subscribers bringing the total number of digital cable homes to 2.1m.
The ITC’s Multichannel Quarterly reports every three months on the take-up of both analogue and digital multichannel television in the UK.
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.
