MediaShift - Dear CBS Sportsline: Close Down Live Streams of Tourney for Our Own Good

Mark Glaser has a pretty humorous take on March Madness as it gets underway today (Full disclosure: As I type this I have the CBS Sportsline live scoreboard open on an alternate screen, but, Andrew, for the record, I am NOT watching video...!).

At the end of Glazer's column was this little nugget:

UPDATE: As of 12:30 pm Eastern Time on Thursday, I couldn’t even get into the site to watch live video and was 101,776th in line to get in. If I had registered earlier in the week, and was a VIP member, I would have got in within five minutes. That means at least 200,000 people are watching the tourney video, with 100,000 more watching a “Waiting Room Meter” to see when they’d get in.

Now, live video is a labor-intensive and expensive undertaking. It's not likely that most of our locations could pull it off yet. However, it is fun to think about the possibilities for video clips of local, high-profile events that folks from throughout our regions and beyond would love to watch. Think Figawi for Cape Cod and Nantucket, Mavericks for Santa Cruz, or Bayshore Marathon for Traverse City. That's the message I'll be carrying forward to the sports editors: Corner the multimedia market for the quintessential events in your market, and expand from there.