News Broadcasting
Focus Television to showcase world’s prolific serial killers in new show
NEW DELHI: Even as most Hindi news channels and general entertainment channels show crime shows, which are part reality and part fiction, news channel Focus Television is all set to launch a new show that will showcase the world’s most prolific serial killers.
Conceived and directed by Franklin Nigam, the series titled Killer, will be screened from 6 June at 10 pm and will be telecast every Saturday.
In the series, each episode is based on a real case, which is well researched. The series aims to bring out details of crimes that shook the world. The first episode is on an American serial killer Ted Bundy whose charming personality helped him kill more than 100 women.
The show experiments with three anchors coming together in the same frame. Each anchor plays a character on the show, which will highlight the highpoints of those cases and decode the crime for audiences.
The three anchors are: Shishir Sharma, Amit Pachori and Shilpa Gandhi. While Sharma has starred in films like Mary Kom, in Killer he will be seen playing the character of a detective. Pachori, on the other hand, is a seasoned actor and will play an advocate. Gandhi, who is a Marathi film actress, will be playing a psychiatrist in the series.
Nigam, who had earlier worked in Lok Sabha TV, was also a part of the team, which produced the Pradhanmantri series on ABP.
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: 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.
