News Broadcasting
TVN Entertainment’s agreement with ESPN for VOD services
CALIFORNIA: This is an alliance that aims at taking the concept of Video on Demand (VOD) beyond just films. TVN Entertainment which provides on demand television programming, management and delivery services has announced a new VOD services agreement with sports broadcaster ESPN.
TVN will provide ESPN with a range of VOD Services. These will support the broadcasters distribution strategy, including encoding, asset management, site-specific metadata and multicast transport to VOD systems throughout North America. This will be accomplished through TVN’s Adoniss platform.
Additionally, TVN and ESPN will explore other VOD opportunities including rapid delivery and real time encoding of time- sensitive content, as part of TVN’s TVNow rapid VOD transport service.
ESPN’s interactive sales VP Matt Murphy was quoted in an official release saying, “ESPN is committed to supporting its affiliates with outstanding content that will allow customers to experience high-quality, branded content from our extensive VOD library. TVN supports our VOD efforts with their ability to customise packages market by market. The flexibility that their platform offers will bring our unique VOD titles to the local and regional levels and capitalise on the seasonality of major sporting events.”
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.
