News Broadcasting
India TV’s winning video strategy drives traffic and engagement surge
Mumbai: India TV, a Hindi-language news channel, As per India TV, it has expanded its digital presence across websites, social media, and video platforms. Video is essential to their strategy in a rapidly evolving landscape. However, a key challenge emerged: ensuring optimal visibility and discoverability of their videos across Google surfaces, even when those videos are hosted on a third-party platform. To increase visibility and drive referral traffic back to their web properties, India TV sought strategies to optimise their content for search.
By implementing video markup on their domain, indiatv.in, following the Video SEO best practices and using the Search Console Video indexing report, India TV exponentially increased the number of video pages indexed by Google significantly boosting video discoverability across Google Search and Discover.
“We sincerely thank Google for their invaluable partnership. By implementing video best practices on our India TV website, we have seen an impressive increase in our video traffic and engagement in just three months! This web video strategy has led to greater discovery of our videos across Google surfaces and consequently major growth in video consumption on our site.” Ritu Dhawan MANAGING DIRECTOR, INDIA TV
158 per cent Increase in Video Impressions on Google Search
67 per cent Increase in Video Clicks on Google Search
The Results
India TV implemented video best practices such as creating a separate video sitemap to make it easier for Google to find their videos, creating a dedicated page for each video to get them maximum exposure and implementing video schema tags to their entire video inventory. After successfully implementing Video SEO best practices and paying careful attention to the quality of their content and metadata, India TV saw a noteworthy 158 per cent increase in video impressions and 67 per cent growth in video clicks in just three months.
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.
