News Broadcasting
SS Music announces ‘Voice Hunt’ winners
MUMBAI: South Indian music channel SS Music has announced the winners of its talent hunt Voice Hunt.
Benny and Swetha (Chennai), Arjun (Coimbatore), Bargavi Pillai (Hyderabad) and Anaida (Bangalore) have made it to the top five after the 10-day long workshop held in Chennai.
24 candidates selected from the first round of road shows held in five cities across South India participated in the workshop.
The winners will go on to do a music album to be produced by Sony Music. The channel will telecast the Voice Hunt show during the first half of October.
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.
