News Broadcasting
ESPN’s SportsCenter celebrates 1st anniversary in India
April is a record month for ESPN’s SportsCenter show in Asia as all three local versions achieved notable milestones with SportsCenter in Taiwan incorporating presenters into the programme, SportsCenter Hindi celebrating its first year anniversary as India’s one-stop source for the latest sports news, and SportsCenter Asia becomes the most popular sports news programme on cable in Singapore.
SportsCenter Hindi, which claims to be India’s first-ever live Hindi sports news bulletin, celebrates its first anniversary. Darain Shahidi hosts the show and segments include Headlines, International News, Cricket News, India Diary, India Results. The show airs at 8pm with a repeat at 11pm from Monday-Friday.
SportsCenter Taiwan is expected to strengthen its market presence with the addition of news presenters Teng Kuo-Hsiung, Julian Lin and Francis Chang, an official release states. The latest decision emulates the winning formula of the American show. Show sponsors are Daimler Chrysler and President PoSweat while segment sponsors include Federal Express, UBS and Adidas.
The live pan-regional edition of the show, SportsCenter Asia broadcasts entirely in English. In markets where peoplemarket research is conducted cable data shows that 39 per cent of professionals, managers, executives and businessmen watch the show in Taiwan. It attracts 47 per cent of male professionals in Singapore and more than half of upscale adult male cable viewers in India. (AC Nielsen Taiwan, TN Sofres Infosys Singapore and TAM India Media Xpress, 13 August 2001-15 March 2002)
In Singapore peoplemeter research shows that SportsCenter Asia is watched by 39 per cent of all cable individuals. The number increases to 52 per cent among professionals, managers, executives and businessmen ages 25 to 44. Competing sports news programmes on other news and sports channels on cable are lagging behind, an official release states.
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.
