News Broadcasting
Siddharth Srivastava appointed as Channel NewsAsia’s country manager
MUMBAI: Siddharth Srivastava, has been appointed as Channel NewsAsia country manager. Based in India, Srivastava will be responsible for marketing and distributing the channel in South Asia and the Middle East.
Prior to this, Srivastava was the senior distribution manager for TV Live India where he launched the Nepal 1 Channel and successfully increased its penetration in India, Nepal and Bhutan.
Channel NewsAsia is an Asian TV News channel that provides news and information on global developments with Asian perspectives. Headquartered in Singapore, Channel NewsAsia reports from the major Asian and key Western cities, including New York, Washington D.C, London and Moscow. Its programming is Pan-Asian in content and style, going beyond the headlines to analyse key
developments.
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.
