News Broadcasting
CAS may bring inventory pressure on FTA channels – TAM
MUMBAI: Conditional access could bring in inventory pressures for free to air channels if demand for their air-time explodes. This is the conclusion drawn by TAM in one of its recent surveys on the post CAS scenario.
Post CAS, says the study, viewership patterns are expected to start changing. Consequently, some of the 3000-odd brands currently advertising on television, and depending heavily on the four metros CAS will roll out in, will start changing their media plans.
Since some FTA channels are already running chockablock inventory levels, with a few having six to eight hours per day dedicated to breaks, a few shake ups are likely to ensue, says TAM. If in a post CAS scenario, advertisers try to buy more, these are a few expected results –
1. Some FTA channels might start bumping off spots. Hence schedule control will become key.
2. Another hypothesis is that they just might start increasing prices to control rising demands.
3. Another speculation is that demand may outstrip supply forcing the FTAs to turn down advertising.
All these results, says the TAM study, will depend on whether viewership patterns change after CAS, on whether the progression of CAS gets all the pay channels back in the reckoning (which depends on the price of the Set-Top Box) and on the significance of the four metros to the 3000-odd brands advertising on TV.
Analysing viewership trends between current FTA and pay channels, the study found that
Assuming that viewership occurs in a particular pattern, the study points out that viewership patterns govern advertisers in their media plan creation as they are chasing viewers. Consequently, the visibility (or GRPs) is really the demand which translates into a supply of inventory for the 3000 odd brands which TAM found had advertised on television in the month of May 2003.
This demand every month has been found to be between 60,000 to 70,000 Normalised GRPs, says TAM.
On an average, 200 minutes of Break Inventory, (the sum total of all time consumed between ad breaks – could have advertising besides the channel’s own promos, film trailers, social messages) got consumed per day during the last quarter of 2002, says TAM.
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.
