News Broadcasting
Zee Telefilms company secretary Vikas Gupta quits
MUMBAI: Zee Telefilms Ltd company secretary and ETC Music business head Vikas Gupta has resigned.
He will be ending his seven-year tenure at Zee Telefilms when he leaves to join a new company in January. “I will continue to be in Zee Telefilms till the end of this month,” Gupta said.
He, however, did not disclose the company he was joining. “I will be the company secretary and head legal and corporate affairs in the new place,” he added.
Besides being the company secretary of Zee Telefilms, Gupta took up various additional responsibilities. He was made ETC Music business head last year while continuing as finance director of ETC Networks since Zee Telefilms acquired the company in 2002.
A few months back, Gupta was also asked to supervise the financial functioning of Essel Group.
One of Gupta’s important assignments was to reach a settlement with the promoters of Padmalaya companies, whom Zee had accused of misappropriation of shares. Zee had taken a 64 per cent stake in Padmalaya Enterprises Pvt Ltd (PEPL) which formed the holding company and held 50.3 per cent controlling stake in listed company Padmalaya Telefilms Ltd (PTL).
Zee later accused Padmalaya founder-promoter GA Seshagiri Rao, along with his relatives, of pledging PEPL’s shares in PTL to raise loans without the knowledge of the board. Zee exited from Padmalaya after being given land in Padmalaya Studios.
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.
