News Broadcasting
AXN’s movie fest hits Mumbai tomorrow
Action television channel AXN, in collaboration with Pepsi and indiatimes.com, begins the Mumbai leg of their Action Movie Festival from tomorrow at the Central Plaza theatre in south Mumbai.
The week-long festival will be screening 28 of the best action movies including super hits like Independence Day, Matrix and the Oscar winning Gladiator. AXN is also organizing an AXN Dares You for the roadshows, which has also started in different parts of the city. Based on the popular Who dares win, the roadshows will give a taste of action to the people of Mumbai along with a chance to win passes for the shows. Catch the AXN roadshows at J49, Bandstand, Hiranandani grounds, St Xavier's College, Planet M, Crossroads and other popular hangouts.
Says, Rohit Bhandari, senior marketing manager, AXN: "Action Movie Festival, the brand, is aimed at extending the AXN experience from your television sets to a much broader canvas, on ground and into the theatres. After a very successful run in its inaugural year last year, AMF has been conceived on a larger, more interactive scale. The festival not only spans many more cities in the coming months but also has a wider range of action packed movies showcasing the best entertainers in business of providing action entertainment to audiences worldwide."
The titles include thrillers such as Bone Collector, Entrapment, Negotiator, Mission Impossible, Jackal, all-time classics such as Braveheart, Broken Arrow, Charlies Angels, Matrix, Gladiator and U.S. Marshals as well as recent action blockbusters such as Vertical limit, Charlie's Angels, Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon, amongst others. The movies star popular action heroes and screen icons such as Russel Crowe, Mel Gibson, Jackie Chan, Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis to name a few.
After a succesful run in Chandigarh, the festival moved to Pune, Ahmedabad and Chennai where close to 30,000 people turned up at each of the roadshows, an official release states. AMF is scheduled to hit more cities in the coming months.
Organised in association with indiatimes.com, an online contest is currently on which gives visitors the chance to win passes for all the 28 movies across seven days.
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.
