News Broadcasting
COVID-19 boon: News channels show 300% viewership growth
MUMBAI: The lockdown amid COVID-19 may adversely impact businesses, but it has helped the television industry, especially the news segment, to achieve a new high in terms of viewership, says a report released by Broadcast Audience Research Council of India (BARC) and Nielsen on crisis consumption.
According to the report, news genre has clocked around 300 per cent increase in terms of viewership across the general category (English, Hindi and regional). Whereas, the business news channels in both Hindi and English languages have risen by 180 per cent in viewership.
The report also points out that while the primetime consumption of news across the country has surged by over 250 per cent, non-prime time news slot saw a rise of 344 per cent in terms of viewership. However, perhaps, for the first time, there has been a drop of over 15 per cent in viewership in general entertainment channels during the primetime slot.
Be it prime time or non-prime time, the overall growth of news channels across languages have seen a substantial rise of over 20 per cent from 7 per cent during the Covid-19 lockdown, mentions the report.
These growth figures of news channels and all other genres are recorded in week 12 of BARC (21-27 March) when compared with week two and four of BARC (11-31 January).
The country is grappling with the rising COVID-19 pandemic. During these testing times, people are consuming more news than any other genre because it keeps them updated about the virus menace and other related information such as the number of cases, do’s and don’ts and various governments’ initiative to curb the pandemic.
Many tech events, sports matches, shootings of films and television shows have stopped and the whole content generation process has come to a standstill, except for the news genre, which has been coming up with Covid-19-related content on a time-to-time basis, as it has been kept under the essential services list.
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.
