This won’t mean much to most Europeans, but March always sees what is called ‘March Madness’ in the States - it is the men’s national basketball championships tournament for U.S. universities. Similar to the FA Cup, I suppose, but packed into a tighter schedule…

Anyway, March Madness is always a huge cultural and media (and gambling) event and this year CBS (owned by Viacom) put most of the tournament games on the internet for no charge. They do contain adverts. Click here for website. The statistics for the webcasts are truly impressive. Any lessons here for the IPTV future? The sports rights controversies? The future of advertising or other funding mechanisms for television? It’s probably too early to say, but the advertiser-funded model appears robust enough to support online broadcasts. As I have written before though, we need to be careful with predictions about the future ‘on-demand’ world.

Oh, and my alma mater (George Mason) just knocked the defending title-holders (UNC) out of the tournament. Regular readers of OfcomWatch (both of you) will recall that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is a UNC alum and fan.