News Broadcasting
NDTV Prime to debut on Monday with reality show ‘Ticket to Bollywood’
MUMBAI: As part of an image makeover of sorts, NDTV Profit will start broadcasting as a dual channel from Monday, 17 March. During market hours, it will air as itself and thereafter, from 9.00 pm to 11.00 pm, as NDTV Prime, showcasing some innovative shows on a daily basis. In a sense, the aim of NDTV Prime is to woo the urban male audience.
Coming to content, a special show titled Ticket to Bollywood has been produced internally with the help of a clutch of producers. Interestingly, it is a one-hour reality show where NDTV will zero in on to-be actors for a film it will be co-producing at a later stage. Currently, auditions for the show are on. “Ticket to Bollywood is a reality show of a GEC (general entertainment channel) scale. 9:00 pm to 10:00 pm is big-bang Bollywood entertainment that will draw eyeballs and not just NDTV viewers,” says NDTV group CEO Vikram Chandra.
Ticket to Bollywood will run for approximately three months (60 episodes), after which, the slot will be replaced with a new show. A comedy show will follow Ticket to Bollywood at 10:00 pm, after which a film strip will be telecast at 10:30 pm, where a film will be broken into five episodes across the week.
NDTV Profit is betting big on the 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm slot, for which it is busy tying up with producers and production houses for newer ideas. “A lot of producers have come up to us and said that they are delighted with the positioning of the channel. There aren’t many channels for men to watch so the primary constituency of NDTV Profit/Prime is urban men,” says Chandra.
Apart from special content, every hour will begin with news headlines and end with sports headlines. The channel is depending on the rollout of digitisation and the presence of appointment viewing. The difficult part will be to get the audience onto NDTV Prime during peak hours when most TV sets are dominated by GECs. Besides, the channel will have to keep investing money into NDTV Prime to get newer and better shows aboard. NDTV Profit/Prime’s main target will be urban homes with two or more television sets.
A media planner on condition of anonymity says, “What NDTV is trying to do is an image makeover. If that happens, advertisers will come, however it isn’t going to have any major impact on viewers or ratings.”
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.
