March Madness On Demand

March Madness is catching on... In Vegas, the first weekend where 48 games are played are now the second busiest weekend next to the Superbowl. This year, CBS & the NCAA began to stream the games in real-time via their MMOD website which broke online viewing records according to the G&M.

It took me an hour to get in on Thursday, even with my supposed VIP access, but I think once the network issues were sorted out, I was able to keep up with all the games. Video quality is decent using a ~360 kbit/s video feed, but there is a little bit of lag so I advised against checking the realtime scoreboard. I think CBS realized that a portion of their audience would be using MMOD from work, so they even built in a "Boss Button" that would hide the webcast and display what looks like an excel spreadsheet instead.