| Entry Number: |
14 |
| Entry Title: |
March Madness on Demand |
| Entry Subtitle: |
Live video of the 2006 NCAA® Division I Men's Basketball Championship at no charge |
| Running Time: |
This highlight clip runs 10:37 but in total MMOD had over 170 hours of programmming |
| Production Company: |
CBS SportsLine |
| Date of originally available(date posted): |
March 7, 2006 |
| Original URL: |
The product was live on CBS SportsLine.com and NCCAsports.com |
| NOTE: |
The video in the above MMOD online example requires RealPlayer in order to play. If you don't have RealPlayer installed on your computer, there is a link below to download the free basic version. Additionally, if you would like to download a Windows Media version of the MMOD video to play from your desktop, there is a link below for that as well. |
| Additional Material: |
CBS SportsLine, in partnership with CBS Sports and the NCAA produced March Madness™ on Demand (MMOD), the online video experience that provided live streaming video of the first 56 games of the 2006 NCAA® Division I Men's Basketball Championship and was available at CBS SportsLine.com and NCAAsports.com.
In 2006 MMOD was presented free of charge for the first time since its debut in 2003, producing tremendous traffic results with over 19 million video streams and five million visits, resulting in what many experts called a watershed moment in media history.
Those figures are believed to far surpass the total number of streams served and visits recorded for any previous live event in Internet history making it quite simply the biggest live entertainment audience in streaming video history - a record that still stands nearly one year later.
In deciding to offer MMOD for free, CBS SportsLine correctly predicted a tremendous demand for the product and designed an ingenious way to manage the online "crowds". CBS SportsLine built a virtual "waiting room" that effectively enabled the company to manage the traffic in and out of the MMOD player. The end-to-end technology system performed so well and the traffic was so effectively managed that the Sports Business Journal remarked that "users went en masse to watch the programming live of their computer…and the experiences were overwhelmingly positive".*
More than just live video from the 2006 tournament, the MMOD player allowed users to keep up with the rest of the tournament with live scoreboards, with a live and updating bracket and even access historical video clips from great NCAA tournaments in the past.
MMOD received incredible coverage and praise in the press, making headlines in nearly 60 major newspapers and magazines and was featured in over 200 radio and television segments.
In ranking their Top Ten Sports Stories of the Year the Sports Business Journal (SBJ), the bible of the industry, singled out MMOD calling it the "a bellwether for online sports" and the "story of the year for many sports and content executives".*
Finally, the SBJ made sure to mention a wildly popular feature of MMOD - the "Boss Button" - "where a click of a button would bring up a phony spreadsheet to fake out superiors at work. That alone is genius". *
(* SBJ December 25-31, 2006 issue)
FINAL NCAA® March Madness™ on Demand (MMOD) Traffic Numbers:
--MMOD served over 19 million streams of live and archived game action
--MMOD recorded over five million visits during the tournament
--A total of 1.3 million users registered for MMOD
--Approximately 30 thousand international users registered for MMOD
--MMOD had 150,000 people in the waiting room on Thursday March 16 just after the first games started, if that line was single-file and visible (assuming each person takes up two feet of space), it would have been over 50 miles long.
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