March Madness online: All 67 men’s tournament games available to cable/pay TV subscribers on any platform

NCAA hoops on a Kindle? Sure!

NCAA hoops on a Kindle? Sure!

I’m not that old, but I am old enough to remember when the men’s NCAA basketball tournament was on broadcast TV only, and not online mainly because the Internet and world wide web were just getting started. I even can take credit for being one of the first to ever try to put live tourney scores online, a battle that started between my outfit and a little place called Starwave Sports that eventually was bought by ESPN. That’s a funny story but you already know the ending.

Fast forward to 2015, when all 67 games of this year’s tournament will be available live, online, streamed to just about whatever device you want — as long as you have a qualifying cable or pay TV contract. With a revamped March Madness Live app, the powers that be behind the tournament broadcasts — Turner Sports, CBS Sports and the NCAA — are promising to deliver the “ultimate digital destination” for live tournament access.

There’s some new games, new social media stuff and other goodies that you can check out at the March Madness site — including a Rhianna video for some reason — but the key thing for most hoops fans will (and always will be) the games themselves, which this year start on March 17. If you have a cable contract you are set, since all you need to do is log in with your account information and you will be able to get “unlimited live streaming coverage and on-the-go access” to all games, which should make it easier than trying to find the truTV channel on your cable guide.

If you don’t have a cable contract you can still watch all the games that are broadcast on CBS; there will also be temporary “preview pass” for other games, which might be all the time you need if, say, you tune in for the last 2 minutes. Also, the games will be available online at the TBS, TNT and truTV sites, as well as CBS, for those like me who watch sports on their big-screen computer monitor while the other family members are holding the TV hostage.

We’ll do another post as the tournament start gets closer, but for now just revel in the fact that you don’t have to worry about whether or not the games will be available, or whether you will have to shell out $3.99 or $10 more like we did in the not-so-old days to watch the tourney online. It’s the fitting end to a long journey. Grampa Internet says you’re welcome.

UPDATE: Some press-photo looks at the new app and bracket app from March Madness Live below.

Game Center view

Game Center view

Android smartphone look at new app

Android smartphone look at new app

Android tablet bracket view

Android tablet bracket view

PGA Goes Big With Social Media at Golf’s Final Major

Screen grab of the PGA's Social Caddy page. Credit: PGA

We’ll have a separate Watching Golf this Week post tomorrow with all the details as usual, but I think it’s worth taking a quick look today at how the PGA is going big with social media for the year’s last major, the PGA Championship, which starts tomorrow.

Aside from the usual flurry of tweets and posts from the tour, it appears that the PGA is leaving no social media stone unturned this week. Starting with something they are calling the Social Caddy — a catch-all portal page with a bunch of links to things like Twitter streams and Instagram photos — the tour also has people roaming around grabbing fun, pointless little Viddy videos like this near-worthless “inside” meetup with World No. 1 Luke Donald.

There’s other stuff too, like assigning a writer to capture the predictions of fans from the PGA’s Facebook page. Pretty neat. But I’m not sure where I stand on the whole Social Caddy page idea — one thing I hear from a lot of people is that they are at the social media exhaustion level, and the idea of having to monitor or join one more place to share is not very appealing. But that may just be the media/golf insider thing. It may very well be that there are a lot of golf fans who are new to things like Twitter and need a helping hand to find Twitter handles for players, golf writers and other interesting folks who might have something worthwhile to say. (It looks like a lot of self-promoters and golf advertisers have found the PGA’s “fans” column on the Social Caddy Twitter feed so I am not sure how worthwhile that stream will be going forward)

So far it also looks like most of the “social” content is being generated by PGA.com types, which can be amusing (there is a Viddy clip of someone standing at the back of the driving range, challenging players to hit him) but will probably get stale soon. It would be much better if the PGA’s Instagram page, for example, had Instagram pix from the players themselves — as we’ve learned from Kevin Love and the Olympics some of that real-insider stuff can be pretty good and bring us a lot closer to the athletes than ever before.

Though golfers are notorious for being cell phone addicts — like Rickie Fowler, who tweets from his private plane — I also seem to see that most of them shut down the streams when the tournament starts. And it’s really not so hard to assemble your own golfing social caddy, by just finding and following people who are interesting in your main Twitter feed. And, I am guessing a lot of this effort is going to be lost anyway due to the atttention conflict with the last weekend of the Olympics. But when it comes to social media, clearly the PGA is trying hard.

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