News Broadcasting
Star introduces Junior KBC and a winning couple
The Star India team, along with Kaun Banega Crorepati anchor Amitabh Bachchan and producer Siddharth Basu, yesterday presented to the media Vijay Raul and wife Arundhati, the first Crorepatipatni winners of the jackpot prize Rs 10 million. Star broke the news while providing details of KBC Junior, which premiers on Sunday, 6 May at 10 am.
Coincidentally or otherwise, the episode featuring the two winners will be telecast the very next day, 7 May at 9 PM on Star Plus.
The first winners of the ‘Crorepatipatni’ format of KBC where husband and wife contest as partners on the gameshow hail from Rourkela in the eastern state of Orissa. While Raul is a chief assistant engineer at GAIL in Rourkela, Arundhati is a homemaker.
“They were a most unassuming couple, and I least expected them to win,” Bachchan said. “In fact I was under the impression that they probably wouldn’t get past Rs 10,000. But they certainly took me by surprise once they were on the hotseat,” he said.
KBC Junior is organised around young participants between the ages of 10 to 18. “My heart was palpitating, I am still weak-kneed after having shot two episodes continuously,” said Bachchan in a light vein while expressing how he felt hours after the shoot of two episodes with a bunch of enthusiastic and precocious children.
To arrest the fall in KBC‘s popularity, Star, as part of a strategic move, shifted the Thursday show of KBC to Sunday placing it at an apt spot when other competing channels air mythological programmes. The programme has received a good response from the advertisers, said Sameer Nair, executive vice president programming Star Plus. While Compaq is giving away a personal computer to any child who makes it to the hotseat, irrespective of whether he is a winner or not, the channel has promised gifts to the 10 final participants. The channel is optimistic about getting a positive response for the programmes and are expecting a two digit TRP rating for the show, said Nair.
According to Basu KBC Junior has received an overwhelming response, with over 600,000 phone calls in the three days lines were open.
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.
