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March Madness On Demand

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http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/basketball/ncaa/02/16/March.Madness.ap/index.html

March Madness games no longer free online for all

NEW YORK (AP) -- Some fans will no longer be able to watch every NCAA men's basketball tournament game online for free.

The model for streaming March Madness will change this year, Turner, CBS and the NCAA announced Thursday. Games aired on CBS will still be free through the network's website. Most, but not all, viewers who get TBS, TNT and truTV on their cable or satellite systems will be able to watch games aired on those channels online at no cost.

Fans can also pay $3.99 to see every game on multiple platforms - online, mobile and tablet.

About 77 million households will be able to watch the Turner channels for free online through a process called authentication. That's out of the 100 million that get TBS and TNT, which are available in around 87 percent of American homes with televisions.

The way fans watch March Madness on TV changed drastically last season with the start of CBS and Turner's 14-year, $10.8 billion deal with the NCAA. Instead of CBS showing regional coverage and switching among games, each contest aired nationally in its entirety on one of the four networks. The shift was a hit: Viewership was up 14 percent for the tournament's opening weekend.

As for the previous five years, fans could also see every game for free online. They watched 13.7 million hours of streaming video online and through mobile devices, a 17 percent increase from 2010.

Turner Sports senior vice president Matthew Hong said the company considered using authentication last year but wanted to wait until people adjusted to the new TV setup. Another factor was that the system was available to far fewer subscribers a year ago; he hopes that by 2013, all customers who get the Turner networks through their providers will be able to authenticate.

The "TV Everywhere" model has become popular with many networks as a way to allow viewers to watch programs on multiple devices while encouraging them to stick with cable and satellite providers. But authentication - proving you subscribe to a provider that offers the service - does require an extra step from past years for fans trying to access NCAA tournament games. Turner is working to make the process easier, such as linking it to customers' Facebook logins.

Some fans with the ability to authenticate may just decide it's easier to pay the $3.99, Hong acknowledged.

"Obviously, a lot of thought and market research went into that price point," he said. "We wanted to make it a fair price and for people to get value at that price. Obviously, we didn't want to make it too high, but we didn't want to make it too low; we want to incent authentication."

March Madness on Demand was launched by CBS and the NCAA in 2003 and required a subscription, with an average price of $15, for the first three years. In 2006, it converted to a free, ad-supported service. The new product will be known as March Madness Live and still include ads.
There was initially a charge for watching games on an iPhone, which became free for just last year. The app will be available on Android phones for the first time during this season's tournament.
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This had better not end up like the other Turner apps for iPad and iPhone, where they have authentication but it's still not accessible to subscribers of certain providers like TWC.

$3.99 is not a bad price, but it's kinda shitty after it was free (ad-supported) last year. Now people will be asked to pay again AND sit through the same two fucking Capital One and Pontiac commercials the whole time.
 
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Jake;2111180; said:
You can watch them all on TV for free again this year, just like last year. :)

CBS
TBS
TNT
Tru TV
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Only CBS is "free". The others you have to pay for a cable package. It's a shitty money grab by Turner. I blame BSPN in all of this. If they didn't try to throw their weight around and steal the tournament, CBS wouldn't have had to sell their souls to Ted Turner to keep the rights.
 
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I don't think it's a bad thing that Turner Sports is involved. For once, basic cable subscribers have a choice of the full range of games for the first two weekends of the tournament.

My gripe is that I'm already paying for those Turner channels once thru my monthly cable bill. Now, I'll have to authenticate, or be asked to pay again.

I've had the other Turner apps on my iPad and iPhone like CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, etc. None of them have allowed me to authenticate with my Time Warner Cable account because the cable company and the content providers won't agree to terms. I'm anticipating that this is going to work out the same way. Unlike the other Turner options that I mentioned, at least I'll have the option of paying an additional nominal amount to subscribe directly to the stream, but it's still kinda disappointing that it might come to that. In the end, I'll cough up the four bucks to have the second screen/portable viewing options if it won't let me authenticate.
 
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Anybody who doesn't see where "pay to watch" sports is going is pretty naive.

It is the ATM model. They offered a free convenience. We loved it. Then they started adding small fees. Turned it up until we started to scream. Then leveled it off. Sit back and count the cash.

Here comes streaming for free. We love it. We are getting accustomed to it. $3.99 isn't so bad.

Let's take is slow while the technology catches up. Make sure the average fan has what they need to drive a 50" HDTV over the Internet.

Then make it $20 for a season of OSU football. That's a steal.

$2 to watch an Alabama-LSU or Oregon-USC regular season game? $2 is nothing.

$10 to watch the baseball playoffs. $20 for March Madness. Come on, it's March Madness! And we can watch every game whenever we want with no DVRing.

And look at the money we are saving since we dropped cable.

Just don't add it up.


And BTN is as much the leader as ESPN or CBS.
 
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Free March Madness On Demand

Just saw this deal pop up on my twitter feed...

Friends of Free ‏ @free Close
Watch all the NCAA March Madness games for free online. Normally $3.99. Takes 1 minute: ow.ly/9qLu1
Click to expand...

The Deal:

Just send a text to 2653 with the message 0kansas. To be clear, it is the NUMBER zero in front of ?kansas?.
Click to expand...

Just did it, got a text back. Entered the code at ncaa.com/cokezero. Filled in email and password (unchecked 'wanting to receive other promotions').

Emailed a confirmation and it looks like I'm good to go in case I need to watch online or a mobile device.
 
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