News Broadcasting
South Africa makes a Bollywood move
Bollywood’s growing popularity overseas, has led South Africa ‘s national public broadcaster SABC to air, for the first time, a series of Hindi films over a period of 13 weeks.
The first among these will be the Sanjay Leela Bhansali opus Devdas, which will be broadcast on 3 April on the corporation’s TV3 channel.
“Other movies in the line-up include Company’ and Bomba,y and all the movies will have English sub-titles” publicity manager, Michael Van Dyk, said in a statement today.
“We shall test the response depending on the audience, and thereafter decide our approach to Bollywood,” he added.
He further said,”A lot of time was spent in choosing the movies. We looked at content, the director and the appeal of the movie to a crossover audience. A deciding factor was also how popular the movie was when it was on circuit.”
This move has been welcomed by organisations of Indian origin people as “long overdue”.
“Now that the SABC has decided to show Bollywood movies we hope that the SABC would also consider movies in other languages,” said president of the Natal Tamil Federation, Bala Naidoo.
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.
