The CBS/Turner media empire did not get its annual broadcast of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament off to a good start this year, unveiling the names of the 68 teams in the tourney—something which could be done in less than 30 minutes without having to hurry—in a two-hour (!) Sunday program that was, of course, loaded with ad breaks. (This strategy was gloriously and karmically undermined when an accurate final bracket was leaked with more than an hour left in the show. It was the lowest-rated selection show in 20 years.)
Now, with the tournament’s round of 64 underway, it’s clear that Turner and CBS and the NCAA have made another frustrating, viewer-unfriendly choice. This one involves the video player on which working stiffs can watch the games while we’re supposed to be blogging about the news and whatnot. The best part of March Madnress is that there are a bunch of games going on at once, and you can switch between them when something exciting happens. But that’s hard to do if you’re watching online, because there is no scoreboard on the “March Madness Live” video player. See that picture above? You can only get to the scores by clicking a button at the top.
This is terrible, and it is crazy. Screenshots of past March Madness Live websites confirm that the player has had a scoreboard at least going back to 2010 before switching to a separate score page last year. Now we know the scoreboard’s not coming back: A Turner representative confirmed to me that keeping scores separate from streaming video is a conscious choice, explaining that in the past the video broadcast often lagged behind the auto-updating scoreboard, creating a spoiler effect. The rep also pointed out that the scores of other games are frequently displayed in graphics on the actual broadcast feed. Which is fine as far as it goes, but when you click through to the “Scores” page and then select a game to watch—even if you just want to go back to the game you were just watching a second ago—you have to watch another auto-play ad. You also can’t access the “Scores” button when your game goes to commercial because the screen locks until the ads are over:
Screenshot/Turner
This is particularly frustrating because you need a cable TV login to watch games via the March Madness Live player. Which means that all of us who are using this contraption have also paid the Turner/CBS network of broadcasters once via our monthly bills. But they’re still charging us again via ads—ads which by the end of the tournament we’ll have seen hundreds of times—when all we want to do is see some [expletive] scores.
