News Broadcasting
BBC claims excellent response to interactive Olympics feature
MUMBAI: BBC’s decision to provide interactive services in the UK for the Olympics has paid off.
As many as 8.96 million digital satellite viewers pressed the red button to use the BBC’s interactive Olympic services. This represents the highest reaching service to date and more than double the previous peak for Wimbledon 2004.
While 83 per cent of those who had pressed the red button used the service for more than three minutes, 61 per cent were still interacting 15 minutes into the service, and 51 per cent stayed over 25 minutes.
Figures show that 58 per cent of the available digital satellite (Sky) audience pressed red to interact. The BBC’s broadband Olympics service which included both live and highlights coverage attracted an estimated 2.8 million requests for at-home broadband streaming.
The site bbc.co.uk/olympics attracted 5.7 million unique users during the games. BBC Sport’s head of New Media, Sports News and Development Andrew Thompson said, “This was the first ever truly interactive Olympics. It is a model for multi-media working at the BBC in the future.
“The interactive services give our audiences exactly what they wanted across the web and interactive TV: extra choice about what events they watch, when and how they watched them.
“The figures we got are a tribute to the production and technical teams who worked so effectively together across all media to deliver a fantastic choice of compelling content.”
The BBC’s interactive Olympics service gave digital satellite and cable viewers the opportunity to choose from four streams of live coverage through the red button in addition to BBC One and BBC Two.
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.
