The New York Times (in the Sports section for once) has this article penned by Richard Sandomir on the decision by CBS to offer March Madness basketball games online at no charge. The interesting part of the piece is that CBS says that it is generating more revenue from advertising this go-around than it did last year when it offered the games on a premium basis.
Already the advertising booked for the online product has exceeded the amount of subscriber revenue amassed last year, said Joe Ferreira, the executive producer of CBS Sportsline. “We felt the free model would increase the number of eyeballs seeing the sponsors’ messages,” he said. Commercials different from those on CBS will be inserted into the streamed games.
Another interesting bit: CBS has set up a system that can accomodate 200,000 video streams at once, exceeding any other planned event on the web, including AOL’s broadcast of Live 8 last summer. To keep the traffic flowing, CBS will query viewers every half hour to determine if they are still watching. If the system doesn’t get a response, viewers will be kicked off and users waiting in a “cyberwaiting” room will be ushered into the events.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:47 AM|Comments(0)
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