News Broadcasting
SET’s growth to stay flat in 2004-05
MUMBAI: Sony-Discovery’s revenue growth will stay flat in 2004-05, affected by the loss of premium movie channel HBO in its distribution bouquet.
SET Discovery Pvt Ltd president Shantonu Aditya admits touching Rs 3 billion will be difficult this fiscal, but says a marginal rise is possible. The company had earned a revenue of Rs 2.85 billion in 2003-04.
Aditya says the ICC Champions trophy, the distribution of new channels and an inflation-linked rate hike of seven per cent with effect from 1 January, 2005 may result in a marginal growth.
But analysts see the loss of HBO neutralising any gain the company had made earlier in the year. Sony-Discovery bouquet’s rate has to be revised downwards to Rs 49.40 in the New Year as the price of HBO was Rs 5.60 per subscriber a month. A permissible seven per cent hike will only put the bouquet rate at Rs 52.85.
Besides, Sony-Discovery bouquet will lack steam in the southern region where the main driver was HBO, the English-language movie channel. Also, in the new bouquet formation, Star India with the Disney channels and Zee-Turner with HBO will have far stronger pull than Sony’s channels of MTV, Nick, Animax and Discovery Travel & Living.
“The last quarter of this fiscal will neutralise whatever growth we could post in the earlier period. We won’t have HBO and we don’t have any cricket left on Max,” says a source in the company. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had put a freeze on subscription rates with effect from 26 December 2003. Sony also could not increase its subscriber base which could have fuelled growth in earnings for the year.
As already reported yesterday, SET Discovery has strengthened focus in the southern region by dividing it into two territories – Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh forming one division while Tamil Nadu and Kerala constitutes the other group. Each division is under a regional manager.
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.
