CBS sets March Madness on Demand record: 8.7M hours of streaming so far

What's it take to validate the decision to stream all of March Madness live, with no pay wall, on demand? How about more than 6 million unique visitors? That's what CBSSports.com has seen in the first four days of the tournament. Its March Madness on Demand site already has served up more than 8.7 millions hours of live streaming video and audio, blowing last year's full-tournament record performance out of the water. The 8.7 million hours of streaming in the first four days of play is a 35 percent increase over last year's entire tournament.

CBSSports.com is streaming all 63 games from the Men's NCAA basketball tournament with both live video and audio coverage.

"With four overtime games in the first four days of the tournament, exciting finishes and upset victories have really sparked March Madness on Demand consumption thus far," said Jason Kint, Senior Vice President and General Manager, CBSSports.com. "Our philosophy of distributing this engaging content across the Internet and utilizing the reach of the CBS Interactive network continues to pay off with record breaking growth."

The Florida-BYU double OT game remains the most-watched game (521,000 hours of streaming video); Robert Morris-Villanova was second (462,000 hours), and Siena-Purdue was third (403,000 hours).

CBS also says its tongue-in-cheek "Boss Button," which hides the action and replaces it with a "business-like" image, has been used 3.3 million times.

For more:
- see this release

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