News Broadcasting
NDTV India pulls the curtain down on crime shows
NEW DELHI: NDTV India, the Hindi news channel from the Prannoy Roy-promoted NDTV Ltd stable, has decided to say goodbye to crime shows. Instead, it will focus more on investigative and topical features.
So, out go daily shows like Dial 100 and weekly FIR. In their place come more socially relevant programmes like exploring the DNA of increasing number of suicides by farmers in the Vidharbha region of India. Even in Metro FIR, the crime segment would be dropped.
“Our strength has always been serious and topical features and we are going to exploit it further. Crime shows and sensational stuff is not our cup of tea,” NDTV India managing editor Dibang told journalists here today, explaining the future roadmap for the channel.
According to Dibang, a print medium journalist-turned-TV newsperson, feedback has shown that crime shows might give ratings, but do have a tendency to pander to sensationalism and be intrusive in the personal lives of people.
“We want to set ourselves apart from tabloid (news) channels and this is not something that we have realized suddenly or over night,” he explained.
However, this realization doesn’t take away the fact that NDTV India, which at one time was seen as the contender for the top spot in the Hindi news space, has slipped to No. 3 position, while Aaj Tak continues to rule as the market leader. Star News has been occupying the No. 2 slot for some time now.
Quizzed on this, Dibang, who came to NDTV from Aaj Tak, acknowledges the recent turn of events, but stands by the theory that NDTV India would rather dish out serious and thought-provoking shows than ones that may bring in the ratings in the short term at the cost of assaulting viewers’ sensibilities.
“We have always been a pro-active channel and given the regulatory environment and policies being proposed by the government, we’d prefer to do away with crime shows and unnecessary sensationalism. NDTV India is not going to be TRP-linked, but become an example for self-regulation,” he counter punched.
As an alibi, he also dished out some figures like declining viewership of crime shows, most of which are aired at 11 p.m. on TV news channels. “Few years back, the novelty factor of crime shows brought in audiences, more than prime time in the evening. But recent data shows viewership of such shows have fallen as the Hindi-speaking audience is slowly maturing,” Dibang said.
Does that mean NDTV India would not cover crime events at all. “We’d cover crime as done by newspapers, depending on an event’s merit,” Dibang explained, adding issues that affect the common man would be more aggressively taken up.
It needs to be seen whether discerning viewers in the HSM flock to NDTV India or not.
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.
