CBS Has A Huge Hit By Streaming the College “March Madness” Basketball Games During the Day, Which Has Created New Problems For Employers: It’s One Thing To Let Employees Use The Internet For Occasional Personal Use, But to Watch Sports For An Hour or More?
Go To Follow Up & Comments

Philip M. Stone March 23, 2006

Last year CBS sold a $19.95 broadband streaming package for the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament and got about 20,000 subscribers. This year it has offered the opening rounds played during the day for free via advertising support, and at one time had 268,000 concurrent streams passing through its CBS Sportsline.com.

So the experiment is a great success. There is no question that given an event people are interested in they will use the Internet at work to watch that event for long periods of time. CBS actually got cute in its experiment and placed a “boss button” on the screen -- if the boss comes checking just click on the button and the audio and video goes away and is replaced by a spreadsheet.

The experiment sounds like good news for content providers. If CBS can do this with basketball, and NBC probably for the next Olympic Games, what’s to stop networks from making available TV shows during the day via broadband that the worker might have missed the night before on television.

It sounds like a content provider’s paradise, but companies are now beginning to take a closer look at how their Internet facilities are being used, and that same technology that allows networks to target specific programs to specific people geographically can also be used by companies to “switch off” specific  video feeds.

It’s not just the loss of worker hours at stake, but also the upkeep of systems that are used by employees for multiple feeds.  One estimate is that the tournament that ends April 3 will cost the US economy close to  $4 billion in lost productivity.

CBS is using sophisticated technology to ensure its streaming doesn’t interfere with its actual telecast of games.  Through the regional semi-finals fans will only be able to watch streaming of those games that are not being telecast in their local area.

On the first day CBS said it fed 1.2 million streams and for the first four days there were four million visitors who watched 14 million video streams of the first 48 games.. Viewers had to pre-register and CBS said that more than 1.15 million persons had done so. (only 30,000 from outside the US).

CBS is streaming the first 56 games but stops with the quarterfinals and beyond that are played exclusively in primetime at night.

“What we’ve done is complement the biggest college sports event of the year with the largest known simultaneous live viewing audience in the history of the Internet for an event of this kind,” said Larry Kramer, president of CBS Digital Media.

Those CBS numbers still pale, however, when compared with AOL’s streaming of the Live 8 concert last year that drew five million visitors over 10 hours. But CBS’ reaching a maximum of 268,000 streams at one time did outpace Live 8’s 175,000 concurrent streams although the record for one event is 335,000 simultaneous viewers on Yahoo for a launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery.

And in case the office worker was in a meeting and missed the game he (statistics say most viewers are young men) can watch the game the next day via iTunes for $1.99 a game or $19.99 for the tournament.

No doubt NBC is watching the CBS experiment with great interest. For the Torino Olympics NBC placed far more video on its web site and got twice as many viewers there as it did for the Salt Lake City Games four years earlier. It also had great success showing curling and ice hockey live on its cable channels during the US qwork day that again proved that people would watch video –whether it was broadband or television – while at work if it was a major sporting event.

CBS has the advantage, however, that it can shut off the streaming once live primetime coverage begins. NBC will still have the problem from the 2008 Beijing Olympics that it has no live prime time events and therefore will have to use all the hype it can muster to ensure tape viewership.

Nielsen Net Ratings reported that all major sports web sites saw spikes in their daily traffic due to the basketball tournament, but none more than CBS Sportsline.com that saw traffic increase by 84% because of the streaming, easily overtaking previous sports leader ESPN.

So is video streaming bad in the workplace? Jon Gibs, senior director of media for Nielsen/NetRatings, thinks not.

 “There have been in the past, and there will be going forward, concerns about the effects of major sporting events on worker productivity. Workplaces, however, should consider that many of these same workers could just as well be taking long lunches, or repeatedly refreshing browser windows to see new scores.

“So while video is certainly not adding to worker productivity, the jury is still out on its negative effects.”

ftm Follow Up & Comments

CBS Earned $4m in Ad Revenue From Streaming College Basketball Tournament - April 28, 2006

CBS has reported that the so-called March madness NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was a big Internet hit for CBS – 19 million advertising-supported streams that earned the company $4 million.

“The revenue was considerable and we will clearly increase it greatly every year for the future years of the tournament,” said CBS chief executive Les Moonves.

Just as important was that television ratings appeared to be unaffected by the Internet streaming, Moonves said.

CBS used a sophisticated out-of-market technical system that permitted viewers in each market to only view those games that were not being telecast by their local affiliate.