March Madness On Demand Killing CBS’ TV Ratings

By Brian Powell
As a whole, ratings for the four day period to start the Tournament were down 9.4%. Not only that, but 13 of the 16 windows had lower ratings in comparison to last year. CBS averaged a 4.8 national rating, down from a 5.3 in 2007. Much of this was due to the fact that a handful of the games aired on Easter, but it very well could have been that everyone was watching online.
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CBS’ March Madness On Demand (MMOD) had it’s issues over the first two rounds, including no sound, random changes in color, and crashing of computers, but in all honesty, what do you want for a service that’s free? Your money back? The numbers that CBS tracked for MMOD were absolutely staggering. The online views for CBS’ game center were up 129% and racked up 3.3 unique visitors per day. There were so many viewers in the first few days that by Saturday, the total of 3,375,451 hours of video overtook the total from 2007’s entire tournament by 659,215 hours. The most watched game online was the first game aired by CBS and MMOD, Xavier versus Georgia.
Also worth noting was fans use of the “Boss Button” within MMOD. The fake spreadsheet feature was clicked on 2,190,488 times. Even though there were a few problems, it’s great that CBS thinks about the fans first when it comes to the first few days of March Madness, and offers the games free of charge.↵