News Broadcasting
NDS seeks dismissal of Canal+ suit
Rupert Murdoch’s television security unit NDS on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss the $ 1 billion hacking lawsuit filed against it last month by rival Canal+ Group and its subsidiaries.
The move comes close on the heels of the San Francisco district court judge who is hearing the dispute agreeing to an accelerated discovery period in the case. The lawyers from both sides were to begin working out a schedule for each to review the other’s documents and other relevant materials.
Canal+, the television security arm of troubled French media giant Vivendi Universal, said yesterday it would oppose the dismissal motion.
In what was essentially a string of technical arguments, NDS, while urging that the case be thrown out, said if any portion of the lawsuit is permitted to proceed, it should be transferred to the federal district court in Santa Ana, California where it belongs.
NDS’ motion claims that Canal+’s complaint does “not belong in the Northern District of California” because Canal+’s allegations have “no connection whatsoever to this District.” The motion asked the court to transfer the lawsuit to the Southern Division of the United States District Court for the Central District of California because defendant NDS Americas Inc. is located there, according to an official release.
Canal Plus, which operates a pay-TV service and whose technology arm designs security measures to keep the signal from being pirated, claimed in the suit that NDS engineers had hacked its security system and then made the relevant codes available for hackers on the Internet. NDS makes similar TV security systems, and NDS has claimed that Canal Plus is using the suit to deflect attention from alleged shortcomings in its own technology.
Both motions are scheduled to be heard on 30 May.
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.
