March Madness hit the Internet today, with CBS and the NCAA offering the first batch of the NCAA Division I Championship games online at no charge to viewers, a mass-market Internet experiment that is a record-breaker, according to CBS. CBS enabled 268,000 simultaneous streams, and chalked up 1.2 million streams served, a record-breaker for a live sports or entertainment event on the Internet.
This level of online viewership tops that of AOL’s webcasts last summer of the Live 8 concert, a move that was itself a break-through in web-based video viewing. Live 8 on AOL accomodated 175,000 simultaneous video streams.
It’s too soon to say just what kind of a turning point the online March Madness games represents, but this development has definitely captured a lot of attention, crystalizing the power of the web as a video distribution platform. The high-level awareness of the online availability of this annual sporting ritual has, moreover, sparked a lot of thought regarding the ability of Internet-delivered video to reduce worker productivity.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:27 PM|Comments(0)
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