CBS and its Web affiliate CBS SportsLine began offering free Webcasts of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on Thursday, and the first-day result was apparently a slam dunk.
CBS SportsLine reported that its site carried more than 1 million video streams of the games that first day, at one point accommodating 268,000 viewers simultaneously. That makes the broadcast the second biggest Web audience for an event, behind only the launch of the Discovery shuttle in July 2005.
For the first time, CBS is offering the first three rounds of championship games free over the Web to out-of-market viewers. The company says it will stream 56 games free through March 26, as a test to see what audience it can draw for major events through Webcasting. On Friday, CBS reported that a total of 2 million fans visited the Web site in the first 24 hours.
“I’m estimating millions of streams served to millions of viewers,” said Joe Ferreira, vice president of programming for CBS SportsLine, before the start of the tournament. “What we’re seeing is a change in consumer behavior. The consumer is used to being able to view content when they want it.”
For the last three years, CBS has packaged March Madness games for a subscription fee of $19.95 and attracted more than 20,000 viewers to its offering last year. The company expects to make up that lost subscriber revenue with increased viewership and higher ad rates during the games.
The CBS SportsLine Web site set up an online “waiting room” to accommodate visitors in case demand temporarily outstripped bandwidth for the broadcasts. Fans can watch sports trivia and follow their position in line for the next available log-in. After 30 minutes’ viewing, visitors are asked if they want to remain connected. If they don’t respond, the connection is dropped, making room for newcomers.
The SportsLine interface also includes a “boss button” that pops up a spread sheet to camouflage any in-office viewing.
And that ruse may get a workout during the coming weeks. Outplacement firm Challenger, Grey and Christmas estimates that 58.5 million U.S. workers will watch some portion of the NCAA playoffs online and that employers will lose $3.8 billion in productivity before the final whistle.
