News Broadcasting
AAAI, IBF reach agreement – no outstandings beyond 75 days
In what should be a major fillip to the way this business is organised, the joint working committee of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) and Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) has reached an agreement wherein all AAAI member agencies will henceforth have to clear outstanding dues to television channels within 75 days.
The agreement comes just over a year (24 February 2001) after the two principal bodies representing TV broadcasters and advertising agencies inked an agreement setting out the basis of the professional and commercial relationship between their respective member groups.
This basically laid out the ground rules for the agreement that was to become effective 1 April 2001, but appears to have been adhered to more in the breach than anything else. As per that agreement, AAAI members were to guarantee payments to channels within a certain credit period. Another aspect to the deal was that advertisers who moved business through AAAI members were to get preferential treatment in terms of rate and credit.
Queried as to how compliance could be assured, a senior channel executive said there was broad consensus among broadcasters for the need to make it work. The IBF will be holding regular review meetings to ascertain how far the deal was working and if agencies were lax in their payments they face being blacklisted, he said. One common defence of agencies in these matters has been that the delays are because advertisers have not paid up. “We will no more allow agencies to hide behind the argument that the client has not paid and therefore the delays,” he said.
The Hindu Business Line, quoting sources in the broadcasting industry, says revenues to the tune of over Rs 3000-5000 million are owed by various advertising agencies to television channels.
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.
