News Broadcasting
‘Taken’ draws lukewarm response for Star Movies
MUMBAI: At least eight million viewers in South East Asia and Taiwan followed Steven Spielberg’s epic saga Taken on Star Movies. In India, however, the show has singularly failed to capture the imagination of the viewer thus far.
TAM data for the six metros SEC AB 4+ for the first two episodes which aired on 12 and 19 October at 9 pm, paint a gloomy picture. The series drew a TVR of just 0.13 and 0.22. The only good news is that slightly more people watched the second episode. So there is still hope for the broadcaster that the science fiction themed show will pick up as it goes along.
It would appear as though a Star Movies multimedia campaign which worked so well for the Academy Awards and for the Made In iIndia band which aired in the same time slot as Taken has failed for once. There were hoardings in the days leading up to the premiere. Some of the most innovative and invigorating television spots on the channel involved Taken. They had given the impression that the only thing one could expect was the unexpected.
Making things worse is the fact that HBO which repeated Top Gun and Universal Soldier The Return for the umpteenth time got higher ratings of 0.19 and 0.35 respectively.
As mentioned earlier, the story for the rest of Asia was very different. Peoplemeter viewing data indicates that the first TV series ever shown on Star Movies, registered two million viewers in Mega Manila. In Taiwan, over 5.5 million people were willingly abducted by the series and over one million Taiwanese fans were tuning in each week.
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.
