CBS prepares for March Madne$$
The network hopes to juice more ad revenue from basketball junkies by offering NCAA tournament games online for free.
By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large
March 6 2007: 12:27 PM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- It's March. And you know what that means. For many Americans the world will stop and the only thing that will matter to them is what their brackets look like in their college basketball office pools.
Starting on March 15, the men's NCAA college basketball tournament, more commonly known as March Madness or The Big Dance, kicks off in earnest. Games begin shortly after noon EST and all told, 32 games will be played on the 15th and Friday, March 16th.
The NCAA tournament is a financial boon for broadcasting company CBS (Charts), which has the exclusive rights to air March Madness games on television. According to figures from advertising research firm TNS Media Intelligence, TV ad spending during this year's tournament is expected to surpass $500 million, a record high.
And for the second year in a row, CBS is hoping to generate even more interest (and revenue) from college hoops by streaming live games for free on the Internet in conjunction with its CBS SportsLine and CSTV online units.
Root, root, root - and pay - for the road team
Users can watch any game they want online (Go Penn Quakers!), except the game being aired on the local CBS station in their market at that time. The online games feature commercials that are different from the commercials airing on the TV telecasts.
Last year, CBS decided to show games for free online, instead of charging $19.95 for the online service as it did in years past. The decision wound up being a slam dunk success for the media company, as 1.3 million users signed up for the March Madness on Demand package and wound up watching over 19 million streams.
CBS also has partnered with satellite TV firm DirecTV to offer a Mega March Madness package of all NCAA games for $69 to DirecTV (Charts) subscribers.
This year, CBS expects even more basketball junkies to sign up for the online games - and the company hopes to avoid some of the technical glitches that plagued the offering last year.
Last year, for instance, people who did not sign up in advance for a VIP package often had to wait a couple of minutes before they were able to log-in to the site and view the game, according to CBS Interactive chief operating officer Steve Snyder.
He said CBS learned from those problems and decided this year to double the server capacity in order to handle more traffic. Snyder also said CBS is increasing the rate that videos are streamed, and is boosting the default size of the screen on the video player.
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