News Broadcasting
Aus, SA seeded first, 2nd at next year’s ICC Champions Trophy
LONDON: Australia and South Africa will be the first and second seeds respectively for the ICC Champions Trophy 2004. The event which takes place in England will air on Max in India from 10-25 September.
Co-defending champions India may have finished in the runner up position at the World Cup in South Africa in March. However its recent loss to Australia in the final of the TVS Cup places it at number seven with a rating of 105. However other teams still have one day matches to play and so Saurav’s boys can move up or down.
The other defending champion Sri Lanka is in third spot with a rating of 107 after beating England by ten wickets. Before 1 December, Sri Lanka still has two more matches to play against England. New Zealand will play in Pakistan. West Indies – the other team in this six-way battle – has a five-match series in Zimbabwe. Bangladesh has a rating of zero.
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.
