News Broadcasting
BBCW’s quiz show ‘University Challenge’ starts 7 August
NEW DELHI: BBC World will showcase the famous quiz show University Challenge in search of the best talent from the country’s top universities and colleges.
If it is the College Bowl in the United States, it is the University Challenge in Britain. The Indian version of the Challenge is hosted by ace quiz master Siddharth Basu and will be on air from 7 August, with additional appointment to view on Sundays.
Over 27 episodes, the best quizzing teams from the top institutes will battle it out to win the prestigious trophy. A press release says that the current format in the UK involves 24 teams a year. After an initial written application, a team of University Challenge staff tours the UK to interview and test the applicant teams.
In all, teams representing approximately 250 universities or university colleges are seen annually. In each of those cases, a standardised quiz and personal interviews are used.
Following that “road trip”, the average team score on the quiz and the interviews are used to select the 24 teams for the year’s series.
The release adds that there were over 350 entries from prestigious colleges across India. University Challenge in India is being sponsored by Samsung Sound.
There will be other attractions, too, as the launch party yesterday indicated where hot babe Mandira Bedi, Cyrus Broacha, Rahul Bose and Sharon Prabhakar pitted their knowledge against each other along with four students, two each from India and Britain.
Also read:
BBC World’s new quiz show to challenge students
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.
