News Broadcasting
Sahara TV plans Rs 2 billion expansion plans
Sahara TV has earmarked Rs 2 billion for its expansion plans to set up a NFDC style film and television academy and a media club for media personalities. The funds for this venture will be raised mostly through internal accruals and the rest by tapping the balance.
The academy will have all the modern equipment like four air-conditioned studio floors (two for films and two for video), 15 digital video cameras, three audio studios, telecine equipment, reverse telecine, 33 edit suites, DVD authoring, animation and a full-blown film processing laboratory. The annual capacity of the project will be 20 full-length feature films and 10,000 episodes of half-hour video.
Sahara will also be launching its news and current affair channel soon. Besides this, the company also plans to launch a new magazine.
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.
