Time Warner Cable, CBS Sports and CSTV plan to provide condensed versions of 63 games of the 2006 NCAA Division I Basketball Championship, including a free preview of the NCAA tournament available on-demand. The condensed games will be available to TWC customers only.
TWC will edit individual games to 15 to 20 minutes in length. All condensed games will be available through Time Warner’s VOD service for $0.99 each.
The partners will also offer two-for-one pricing on first/second round tournament games. Bundled games might be condensed to as little as 10 minutes each.
The games will be available through April 10, 2006.
Meanwhile, CBS SportsLine, CBS Sports, CSTV and the NCAA, who are streaming live video of the first 56 games of the championship tourney, claimed an Internet record for a scheduled live entertainment or sports event with over 268,000 simultaneous streams. In total, NCAA March Madness on Demand has already surpassed 1.2 million video streams served.
NCAA March Madness on Demand is available at NCAASports.com. In yet another sign that watching streaming video is becoming a common activity, CBS and the NCAA have attracted enough advertisers to make the streamed casts of the games available for free.