News Broadcasting
Judge sets discovery period in Canal Plus vs NDS case
The battle being played out by media giants Vivendi Universal and News Corp through their respective television security units in a district court in San Francisco has entered a critical juncture. At issue is a $ 1 billion piracy suit filed last month by Vivendi’s Canal Plus alleging that engineers at NDS Group broke Canal Plus’ security systems for its digital pay-television service and made the codes available on the Web for free. NDS is 80 per cent owned by News Corp.
Both sides said the judge had agreed to an accelerated discovery period, and that their lawyers will immediately begin working out a schedule for each to review the other’s documents and other relevant materials.
They said their lawyers would report back to the judge on any difficulties, and the judge would arbitrate the disputes.
Canal Plus’ suit asks for damages of $1 billion, the amount it alleges it has lost from the supposed piracy. Both NDS and Canal Plus’ Canal Plus Technologies unit make “conditional access” systems that allow digital television providers to restrict, usually through a special card that plugs into the set-top box, what programs a customer receives.
Last week, Canal Plus filed an affidavit with the court from an engineer whose consulting firm is partly owned by NDS and who claims to have exact details on how NDS allegedly pirated Canal Plus’s codes.
In an official release, NDS said “the judge approved NDS’s suggestion that the parties work out a comprehensive discovery plan.”
” As NDS explained to the judge, NDS intends to show that Canal+’s claims have no basis and needs discovery from Canal+, in part to determine whether Canal+ is improperly using NDS technology. NDS and Canal+ were instructed to work out a discovery plan and report to the court if they are unable to agree,” the statement says.
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.
