News Broadcasting
Hitch in Thaicom transponder affects Star News, etc, SS Music
MUMBAI: Star News faced a transponder problem late Sunday night, which was resolved only early this morning at 6 am. The news channel uplinks from India via the Thaicom transponder to the Asiasat 3 satellite.
The hitch was with the Thaicom transponder, which broke down late last night and being a weekend, took a while to get fixed. Shekhar Suman’s Poll Khol was the show that lost out as a result of this.
Star News uplinks through the Videsh Sanchar Nigam’s Ltd.’s gateway in Mumbai to an Insat satellite from where it would be downlinked at Star’s Hong Kong headquarters. The final product, in a digital format, would then be again uplinked to Asiasat 3 satellite for beam back into India and the neighbouring areas where it can be downlinked by MSOs and cable operators for further re-distribution.
Star News brand director Keertan Adhayantaya says, “Since it was a weekend, the problem took some time to get resolved. We usually have a back-up plan ready for such unforeseen problems. On our part, the effort is always such that the channel doesn’t get affected. But since it was a Sunday, it took longer.”
As a result of this break down, the news channel lost about an hour of advertising moolah, but Adhayantaya was confident that the channel would recover this loss in the next couple of days.
The other channels that were also affected by this were music channels etc and SS Music.
All the other Star channels uplink from Hong Kong as each sends in the programme tapes to the head office. Star News is the only channel on the Star Network that uplinks from India.
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.
