News Broadcasting
Prashant Sanwal out of Zee; joining Maharaja Broadcasting in Lanka as CEO
MUMBAI: Prashant Sanwal, director of all the Zee Network’s regional language Alpha channels, is moving on.
Sanwal, who put in his papers at Zee on 31 March, is taking up a posting in Sri Lanka early next month as CEO of Maharaja Broadcasting. Maharaja owns and operates two terrestrial TV stations and three leading FM radio stations in the Emerald Isle. Sanwal will be based in the Lankan capital Colombo.
Sirasa is the Sinhala channel of the network and the other is Maharaja Television (MTV), which is a Tamil and English language channel. English programming airs on MTV post 9 pm.
Before his stint at Zee, Sanwal was vice-president at Sony’s MAX channel, with an aborted period in between the two postings as one of the four directors of the stillborn MAK (Manoranjan, Aur Kya) Network.
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.
