News Broadcasting
&pictures beats Movies OK on the digital platform
MUMBAI: The promise of &pictures being India’s first interactive Hindi movie channel is strengthened with the unique strategy adopted for the premiere of Chennai Express. The Chennai Express mania refuses to die garnering a staggering 5949 TVTs and propelled the channel to zoom ahead of competition. The Week 47 data issued by TAM reveals the following key highlights:-
&pictures zooms past competition with 112609 GVTs on CS4+, HSM levels
Source: TAM, wk 47, Cs4+, HSM
On the digital platform, &pictures has beaten Movies OK garnering 80129 GVTs
Source: TAM, wk 47, Cs4+, HSM
Chennai Express garners higher Time Spent than that of Boss on Colors
Source: TAM, wk 47, Cs4+, HSM
&pictures garners highest Time Spent in the Hindi Movie genre.
Source: TAM, wk 47, Cs4+, HSM
Chennai Express on &pictures also zips past popular primetime GEC shows like Big Boss, Nach Baliye, CID, KBC, Crime patrol Comedy Nights with Kapil
Source: TAM, wk 47, Cs4+, HSM
The channel had lined up an extensive and innovative marketing campaign including TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor, OOH and Cable for this big ticket premiere that aired on November 23rd. Putting across a differentiated digital strategy helped the channel touch the pulse of the youth through Facebook, Twitter and the blogging community.
The initiative of sending a reminder calls in Shah Rukh Khan’s Voice received a record breaking 153357 unique callers. Selecting four IndiBloggers to relive the journey that SRK and Deepika Padukone had done in the film is clearly a case of achieving success through customer-driven marketing innovation. The bloggers recreated the entire Chennai Express journey which engaged the audiences online. The same was supported by @AndPicturesIN to drive more conversations around the movie premiere. The activation which began on 18th November had four IndiBloggers (Karishma Rawat, Nandini Deka, Arvind Passey & Ramit Narang) travel via Chennai Express train from Mumbai to Rameshwaram. It proved to be an effective medium of getting the audience engaged with the blogging community who kept throwing them challenges enroute their journey. The link www.indiblogger.in/chennaiexpress had live updates from the 4 bloggers and they created record breaking conversations on twitter & Facebook.
Talking about the marketing strategy, Akash Chawla, ZEEL, National Channels, Marketing Head, said, “The rise of social media and the increasingly connected customer makes us continuously think out of the box to engage them in newer and interesting ways. By allowing our viewers to experience a film in person before they see it in their own homes, we ensured that &pictures is synonymous with quality and a channel that puts their viewers first. This innovation in the online space has reaped us the benefit across platforms. It has helped us to overcome existing and emerging challenges and set benchmarks which we look to break again in the near future.”
He adds, “Remarkably, the campaign saw an additional 500 tweets with #chennaiexpressandyou even after the film had premiered. The campaign successfully reached out to a whopping 1.4 unique Twitter users and received over 14 million impressions on Twitter. The impressions via IndiBlogger network was a staggering record 1 Million + and including the impressions generated by four bloggers traveling it comes to a whopping 6.6 million. Owing to the phenomenal response received by this activation, #chennaiexpressandyou was the most talked about topic on Twitter so much that we broke Twitter.”
&pictures marketing strategy for the premiere of Chennai Express was a unique blend of traditional and digital mediums with innovation and differentiation.
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: 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.
