CBS Sportsline's MMOD Unlikely to Beat AOL's Live 8
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Mike Shields[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]MARCH 20, 2006 -
[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]March Madness on Demand, CBS Sportsline's product offering free live video streaming of the NCAA basketball tournament, has been seemingly setting records - depending upon which metrics are referenced - but has also fallen short of some the loftier expectations surrounding the event.
Over the first four days of the tournament, covering 48 games, Sportsline.com delivered a total of 14 million video streams and recorded 4 million visitors for MMOD - undoubtedly impressive numbers for an online video event. However, the 4 million visitors figure does not constitute a unique audience number (CBS yet to release a pure unique users number). In total, 1.15 million individual users have registered for MMOD to date.
That figure doesn't come close to the audience numbers which came out of the Web's previous streaming video landmark event, AOL's coverage of the Live 8 charity concerts last summer. AOL's streaming of Live 8 on July 2, 2005 drew a total unique audience of 5 million users during roughly a 10 hour period - according to AOL.
Yet prior to the NCAA tournament, CBS executives, along with several analysts, boldly predicted that MMOD would exceed AOL's audience for Live 8, Sportsline's vp of programming Joe Ferreira went as far as saying that he believed that MMOD would deliver "the biggest live event in Internet history."
"I say that with no reservations," he added.
That does not appear to have happened - at least not yet.
MMOD did surpass Live 8's mark for simultaneous video streaming, as its audience peaked on Thursday with a whopping 268,000 concurrent streamers, besting Live 8's 175,000 concurrent users by 53 percent. However, Yahoo's live streaming of the Space Shuttle Discovery Launch - also last summer - drew 335,000 million users at once, and according to NASA that event was eventually viewed by 2.6 million users.
Though Live 8 - which took place on the Saturday of the typically barbecue and picnic-filled July 4th weekend - did not have the built in at-work audience unique to March Madness, it did have several advantages. First off, the event itself was the first of its kind in two decades. Plus, the roster of artists appearing at Live 8 included acts with worldwide appeal, including U2, Jay-Z and Coldplay, while college basketball generates little interest beyond the United States (CBS said that approximately 30,000 of its registers MMOD users came from outside the U.S.).
Plus, AOL's Webcast capitalized on what many considered dissatisfying TV coverage of the concert - while TV continues to be the preferred way for most fans to watch the NCAA Tournament when they are not at the office.
Sportsline also deliberately limited its potential audience by requiring its users to register to view the games and then wait in line to utilize a finite amount of streaming capacity. By comparison, AOL's Live 8 coverage was open for all to view. Because of that, CBS is likely content with where traffic netted out, according to JupiterResearch analyst David Card.
"Obviously, they didn't underperform by their standards," he said. "They didn't want to max out their network. One of the things they didn't want to do was to set high expectations and then not deliver."
While MMOD was for the most part free of major technological hiccups, some reports of long waits or faulty access have surfaced. Yet Card believes that the learning and the public relations value that Sportsline has garnered has made the event pay off quite well. "This was an experiment," Card said. "I think they got their experiment's worth."
Of course, CBS still has several more days of NCAA coverage to catch both the Shuttle launch and Live 8, as Sportsline will resume offering live coverage of the third round of the tournament this Thursday and Friday, though those games will take place during evening hours (the quarterfinal, semifinal, and final games of the tournament will be shown exclusively on CBS and will not be streamed on the Web). It's likely that the total number of video streams for the event will approach more records - though in general such records are difficult to quantify, as streaming metrics typically come from individual sites rather than third parties like comScore Media Metrix.
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