News Broadcasting
US teens prefer mobiles to television: survey
MUMBAI: One half of 1000 teens in the US are more glued to their mobile phones than television. This is part of the findings thrown up by a survey conducted by the US research firm Itracks.
The online survey, conducted for ACE*COMM, polled teens across North America between the ages of 13 and 18 from 30 July to 9 August 2005. The survey also revealed that on average, teens spend almost as much time on their mobile phones as they spend doing physical activity.
The survey has also found that mobile phone abuse is rampant among the teens. More than one-third (38 per cent) of teens surveyed use their mobile phones to SMS their friends during school, 30 per cent play video games on their phones while in school, and more than one-quarter (26 per cent) use their phones to talk to people their parents would not approve of.
ACE*COMM is the US-based global provider of advanced operations support systems (OSS) solutions for telecom service providers and enterprises.
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.
