News Broadcasting
Shilpa Shetty voted Indian Diva of the year on SaharaOne
MUMBAI: On 31 December 2004, vivacious divas like Amrita Arora, Dia Mirza, Gauhar Khan, Meghna Naidu, Riya Sen, Mehek, Koena Mitra, Aarti Chhabria, Anusha, Ishaa Koppikar, Rakhi Sawant, Shefali Zariwala, Shophia Chaudhury, Yana Gupta, Priyanka Chopra and Shilpa Shetty danced to their favourite numbers on Indian Diva on SaharaOne.
The show, which was aired at 8 pm also gave viewers a choice to select their favourite diva via SMS.
Through the SMS votes received from millions of people across India, the gorgeous Shilpa Shetty was adjudged as the SaharaOne Indian Diva of the year.
Not only this, Raghuram Ravuri from Karnataka, Dr Mukesh Chawla from Delhi, Arun Kumar Singh from Jamshedpur, Bhupinder Godara from Haryana and Sunita Sachan from Mumbai were the lucky one win an Onida Plasma Screen Television Set.
SaharaOne sure ended 2004 with a bang!
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.
