News Broadcasting
Nickelodeon gets set for May action
Even as the Disney threat continues to loom large on the horizon, children’s channel Nickelodeon is finally making a serious play for the viewer’s attention.
After nearly 18 months of being around, Nick is seeing better carriage in Mumbai, at least. Says Sanjeev Hiremath, vice-president, network development, South Asia, licensing and merchandising, MTV India, “This kind of favourable positioning by the cable fraternity is being achieved without resorting to paying carriage fees.” Hiremath claims the channel’s reach touched 9.8 million by March and would reach 11 million this month.
Beginning this month, Nick is also going all out with some serious promotional activity in the form of movie screenings, direct contact campaigns aimed at kids, banners in various localities and contests. The channel is also trying to shed the myth that it is trying to woo viewers away from chief rival Cartoon Network. Hiremath says it would be wrong to assume that Nick’s growth depended solely on how much it could grab from Cartoon Network’s viewer base. Nick’s target audience is eight to 14-year-olds while Cartoon Network’s audience was mainly kids who were eight and under, he maintains.
Nick may well have its work cut out, considering that Pentamedia promoted Splash, another kids’ channel, is also aggressively trying to expand its presence. Splash’s current target is to fan out with telecasts to 23 of what are normally classified as the TRP metros and cities. This will comprise places like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Pune, Goa and towns of Punjab among others.
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.
