NCAA basketball tournament on the ‘net: bigger, better, more March Madness

CBS is betting heavily you will love what it’s done to help you watch March Madness from your PCs. The company said today it is doubling the amount of bandwidth available for NCAA Tournament basketball games. Not only that, but it is borrowing a trick from computer games, to again offer a “Boss” button on the player that viewers can hit if they see their supervisor coming, which causes a fake spreadsheet to pop up and silences the audio feed. (CBS does explain on its Web site how companies can block online access to the video player.) The new system will support 300,000 viewers at any given time, up from 175,000 simultaneous viewers last year. NCAA March Madness on Demand (MMOD) this year includes: A 50% larger Video Screen enlarged to 480 X 360 pixels from 320 X 240 pixels. In addition, CBS SportsLine will provide streaming live audio from Westwood One’s radio broadcasts of the first 56 games of the tournament via the MMOD player. And there will also be a live halftime show with analysis. The NCAA games are big business for CBS these days. In fact it took in about $4 million in online advertising from the games last year, and Chief Executive Leslie Moonves told investors last month that the company expects to double those revenues and increase profits sixfold, according to the Associated Press. Only the first three rounds of play are being offered online, with many of the games concentrated during the afternoons of March 15th and 16th.