News Broadcasting
Pakistan expects Paksat-1 geostationary satellite to begin services early next year
MUMBAI: Pakistan is gaining use of a defective Boeing 601 satellite and plans to use it to provide commercial telecommunications services starting in early 2003, spacenews.com has reported.
Pakistan renamed the Palapa C1 satellite as Paksat-1, its first geostationary satellite, and hopes to begin commercial services by early next year. The satellite has already been moved to its new orbital slot at 38 East Longitude.
Palapa C1 was launched in 1996 for PT Satelit Palapa Indonesia and is now owned by Hughes Global Services, which seeks new users for satellites unable to fulfill their originally intended missions.
Hughes reportedly has a five-year $30-million contract with Pakistan to develop the potential of Paksat-1’s orbital slot. Paksat-1 has over 30 C-Band and Ku-Band transponders, and is expected to provide commercial services including Internet backbone services, remote Internet access, business communications, video, audio and data services and thin route telephony.
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.
