News Broadcasting
BBC World News launches ‘The Yearbook’; gets Chivas Regal as title sponsor
MUMBAI: BBC World News has launched a new series of vignettes called The Yearbook and has whisky brand Chivas Regal as the title sponsor.
The Yearbook series follows the stories of six real life school friends from Singapore, whose lives have taken different and interesting routes since they left school.
Each one-minute vignette takes up the story of a different individual, while showing how the friends have maintained their relationships together since they graduated.
Apart from sponsoring the event, Chivas Regal will also be taking a supporting advertising campaign online on bbc.com from January 2010.
TheYearbook vignettes will run in BBC World News Asia Pacific feed from this week until the end of March. Advertising for the brand will also appear on BBC Knowledge.
Says BBC advertising sales regional director Cindy Tan, “We’re happy that Chivas Regal has chosen to sponsor the Yearbook vignettes and to advertise with us. It’s a real vindication of our strength in the Asia Pacific region and the way our multi-platform offering helps advertisers to reach a high quality audience. We have a compelling offering for luxury advertisers, and particularly strong evidence that such brands thrive in the environment of bbc.com.”
Adds Chivas Regal VP – marketing Xavier Beysecker, “BBC World News has a strong and broad distribution in Asia, and its reach amongst our key audiences makes it perfect for us. The fact that we can extend our campaign across a range of channels, including bbc.com. Also, this means we are communicating across multiple touch-points. The Yearbook series matches the values of our ‘Live with Chivalry’ campaign perfectly, and we’re looking forward to seeing it on air.”
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.
