 Monday morning. We all had a chance to sleep it off; now, let’s get a bit more in-depth with CBS’s on-demand streaming video coverage of the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament. According to CBS’s press release, over one million of you tuned in online at some point during the past four days, almost certainly doing nasty things to the bandwidth at your office and possibly annoying your IT department without your knowledge. Nonetheless, you made some people very happy: CBS, the NCAA, the IT department at CSTV, and, of all people, Bud Selig. Yes, Mr. NCAA-Tournament-Streaming-Video-Watcher, you made the Commish very happy indeed.
Getting On
Let’s start with the basics: CBS reports the following numbers: 14 million video streams, over 4 million visitors, 1.15 million registered users. Because only registered Sportsline users can access the video feed, that number seems best equipped uniquely to assess the popularity of the service, which, by most accounts, seems to have worked very well. CBS reported that at one point Thursday afternoon, during the initial hours of the feed, 268,000 unique streams were being served simultaneously, which, according to Mediaweek, shatters the previous record of 175,000 simultaneous streams, set during AOL’s coverage of Live 8 last summer. For our part, on Thursday, we benchmarked the video feed in the following manner: two PC’s, each linked to a gigabyte internet feed, were each logged in to March Madness On Demand (MMOD). One computer was logged in using a pre-established Sportsline account, taking advantage of the VIP service that CBS offered to users who registered for MMOD before the start of Thursday’s games. VIP status entitled users, according to CBS’s advance promises, to shorter lines in the virtual “waiting room” that CBS had put together for the event. The other computer was logged in using an account created Thursday at around 11:15 a.m. CBS had announced that the waiting rooms would open around 11:15 Thursday morning. At that time, we logged in to our VIP account and stood in line. At this time the VIP line was around 5,000 people long and we gained access to the screening room almost immediately. Meanwhile, we signed in on the non-VIP computer at around 11:20 and proceeded to wait in line. By this point there were approximately 57,000 people in front of us, and the line moved slowly. The server was clearly trying to usher in as many VIP viewers as possible, and the “General Admission” line was at a standstill. It had swollen to more than 100,000 people by time we gained admission to the screening room, and it took approximately 75 minutes. Immediately after gaining access to the screening room on the non-VIP computer, we logged out again and started over. The line was still more than 100,000 people long, but at this point CBS had clearly started to open up their servers more freely. Presumably the techies at CSTV were opening the floodgates slowly, and, upon realizing that the system was working, decided to open them wide: our 100,000-viewer line evaporated in about 15 minutes. From that point onwards, for the rest of the day, we never waited, not for VIP or General Admission entrance, except to wait the requisite 90 seconds that the server forces upon you each time you enter. Staying On
 So far, so good. On to the actual service; after all, CBS’s numbers don’t really mean anything here unless the streams themselves function appropriately. And, for our part, they did … mostly. The “live” video stream ran at anything from a 26- to 40-second delay off of the actual “live” broadcast, something which it became much easier to discover in those moments when our local CBS affiliate would bounce over to another game – MMOD was blacking out games served by local CBS channels.
Additionally, the MMOD feed seemed to have a very manic attitude about commercials and halftime shows. At times, we seemed to get most, if not all, of the same extra programming that the broadcast feeds were receiving; at others, the video player gave us a blue-screen-of-wait-patiently-please which, every once in a while, resolved itself. On more than one occasion we would impatiently flip away from a blue-screen-of-wait-patiently and then back, only to discover that we had missed actual gameplay thanks to the feed freezing up. Apparently the blue-screen-of-wait-patiently sometimes functions correctly, and sometimes just freezes in place; this happened on both PC’s and, subsequently, in two Mac’s on an entirely different network.
We assume that CBS’s longer-term vision here is to set up video feeds that completely mirror the national broadcast feed, and that watching streaming video commercials would be much the same as watching ones on “regular” TV (except that the Applebee’s ad might be even more annoying). Understandably there are rights issues to be negotiated to make this process happen, and some balance to be struck between national ad-buys and the local ad-buys that networks parcel out to their affiliates; nonetheless, CBS has work to do in trying to compensate for feeds that freeze at inopportune moments (or players that are no longer reading the feed as active, which may also be the case). Getting Paid
And finally, because we promised: see the little bit at the bottom that notes “Technology Provided by MLB.com”? That’s right: this whole enterprise is done thanks to the good folks at Major League Baseball Advanced Media. If this is the first time you’ve heard that name, check out the chronicle of its ambiguously evil history. But what we just saw, and just took part in, was one of the great media technology auditions of our time: MLBAM just proved to the world that it can handle broadband video to a degree and with a dexterity that no one had tried before. So this doesn’t have to be about college basketball. This is about the race to mobile content delivery, and the race to successful internet television, and about Major League Baseball’s proprietary investment leading the way. Remember: MLBAM was built on a $1 million investment from each Major League Baseball franchise, and each franchise should now hold equal share in MLBAM’s profits. Off of the strength of this audition, MLBAM can leverage its broadband broadcast potential against delivery practices in other sports and media venues, not to mention Major League Baseball itself. Yes, MLBAM was originally began to help set up MLB.com’s largely profitable subscription-based streaming-baseball-video system. One of the merits of making that feed subscription-based is that it helps keep demand low enough such that the infrastructure can handle it; this weekend, MLBAM proved that its infrastructure is ready to graduate to the next level; just like the NFL Network, we might soon start seeing Major League Baseball keeping some rights just for itself. |
Daily Digest 
