NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

A CBS spokeswoman said Lundquist had back surgery last fall and decided to pass on doing this year’s men’s college basketball tournament. Jim Nantz, Bill Raftery and Grant Hill will continue to announce the Final Four and championship game.

The collaborative effort between CBS Sports and Turner Sports continues on the operations and engineering at this year’s Final Four, but it’s an “all-CBS” year, and a long-time CBS Sports star, Patty Power, has taken the helm, overseeing the production that features VR, 360-degree replay and 8X super-slo-mo.

The extension announced today goes all the way through 2032. It retains the existing format for TV, with early-round games aired across CBS and three Turner networks: TBS, TNT and truTV. The Final Four will keep alternating between CBS and Turner. The extension pays an average of $1.1 billion per season, up from more than $770 million on average under the current contract.

The men’s college basketball final saw ratings tumble in its move to cable, and now there’s talk the NCAA may want to move the game back to broadcast for good, rather than alternate between CBS and Turner, according to Sports Business Journal.

Villanova’s last-second win over North Carolina on Monday night averaged a 10.6 rating across TBS, TNT and truTV in the first title game to air on cable. The 17.8 million viewers were down 37% from the 28.3 million for last season’s Duke-Wisconsin matchup on CBS, which drew the largest audience in 18 years. Viewership was down 16% from the 21.3 million for UConn-Kentucky in 2014.

The UNC-Syracuse game posts 12.9 million total viewers across three networks, off 43% from last year. It was also down 21% from the 2014 contest.

The NCAA has decided to broadcast the most important part of this year’s college basketball tournament, the Final Four, in virtual reality, for the first time. Presented as a partnership between the NCAA, CBS and Oculus, the live stream event will be produced by VR production house Voke.

On April 4, TBS will become the first cable channel to air the title game of March Madness, reflecting a broader trend in the media world of marquee events shifting from broadcast to cable networks.

NBC’s Little Big Shots was the top-rated non-sports show during primetime Sunday, although its 2.6 rating with adults 18-49 was a 7% dip from last week’s. Regardless, the NCAA’s Men’s Basketball Tournament lifted CBS to win the night. 

The broadcast of the final game of the final game of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament on TBS — the first cable network to air the event — could pay off for Time Warner, which has spent billions of dollars buying the rights to air NCAA, Major League Baseball and NBA games. But the company risks losing profits from sports over time if more people cut their cable cord.

Amid strong TV ratings, the NCAA College Basketball Championship game pulled in an estimated $153.4 million in advertising revenue on CBS — part of some $1.1 billion that was spent for the entire three-week tournament.

This year’s NCAA men’s basketball championship game was another nail-biter that came down to the final minute. But viewers evidently weren’t as interested in this year’s game. Monday’s final averaged 21.2 million total viewers, according to Nielsen, off 10% from the 23.4 million who tuned into the 2013 final.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament has already had a number of big surprises. And that’s generating some big ratings. Through Saturday night, the four networks airing coverage of March Madness are averaging 8.8 million total viewers per game, according to Nielsen, up 7% over last year, when it averaged 8.2 million. That’s the best average since 1991, when the tournament expanded to four telecast windows across the first four days of play.

The Web and mobile NCAA March Madness Live service, managed by Turner Sports, over the first three days of the 2014 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament served 21 million live video streams, up 42% versus last year, and more than 4 million hours of live video (up 18%), according to Turner, citing data from Omniture, Conviva and Bango.

Advertising revenue for the three-week-long 2012 NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament totaled $1.15 billion — tops among all big post-season TV sports programming franchises.

2014 and 2015 NCAA men’s basketball tournament games will air on TBS as yet another major sporting event jumps from broadcast. Three years ago Turner began broadcasting the first five rounds of the tournament along with CBS, but the marquee Final Four contests had remained on broadcast. Under the new arrangement, which covers 2014 and 2015, CBS will retain custody of the NCAA men’s basketball final. In 2016, TBS will televise both the Final Four and the national championship, then the three games will switch to CBS in 2017.

NEW YORK (AP) — After two initial replays, CBS stopped showing footage Sunday of Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware breaking his leg during the first half of his team’s NCAA men’s tournament game against Duke. The injury during the nationally televised game, and the shocked reaction of Ware’s fellow players, called to mind the gruesome […]

Local ratings in the markets of the schools in the NCAA semi-finals were huge. In fact, in Louisville, they topped those of the Super Bowl.

CBS and Turner may own exclusive broadcast rights to the NCAA basketball tournament, but ESPN is pulling in March Madness-crazed fans on mobile devices.

Monday night’s NCAA men’s basketball final between Butler and UConn dipped 17% from the previous year. Considering what a painfully sloppy game it was to watch, CBS is probably glad it didn’t dip more. The championship drew a 13.3 household rating, according to Nielsen metered markets, compared to a 16 rating for last year’s contest between Duke and Butler.

Airing opposite the NCAA men’s basketball title game on CBS, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars slid 12% in its third week to a 4.6 adults 18-49 rating. That’s still a strong rating, putting it second behind the game for the night. And Stars actually pulled its biggest audience ever against the annual CBS broadcast, 21.4 million viewers, though that was down more than a million from last week.

Although comparisons are difficult, CBS Sports and Turner Sports say the big NCAA Men’s Basketball event has seen its best results in six years. Overall, total average viewers in the tournament are up 11% to a Nielsen preliminary 9.4 million from 8.5 million a year ago.

As the NCAA basketball tournament gets into fall swing today, over-the-air viewers and some affiliates are uphappy  with the new TV schedule, in which games are appearing on TNT, TBS and TruTV for the first time as well as CBS. Affils are disappointed that they no longer can pick games with local interest. “I think all hell is going to break lose,” says Tom Griesdorn, GM at WBNS Columbus, Ohio, which will not be showing Ohio State game. “In years past, viewers would just go to channel 10. It’s going to be interesting.”

In a open letter to CBS CEO Les Moonves and NCAA President Mark Emmert, Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) asked them to move the Connecticut Huskies NCAA tourney game Thursday night against the Wofford Terriers from TNT to CBS affiliate WFSB Hartford. According to Courtney, 150,000 Connecticut households would be unable to watch the game on cable.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament is already the second-most-lucrative sporting event on television each year, and this year it stands to gain yet more ad revenue. Jon Swallen, SVP of research at Kantar Media, talks about sold-out inventory, whether ad revenue will rise and why CBS took on a partner.

Next week, CBS and Turner Sports will unveil a new way to watch the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, using two companies, two production teams, two sales forces, and four networks to air every game in the 68-team tournament. Although a plan may be in place, the playbook is by no means carved in stone, as even the top executives at CBS and Turner are not sure how quickly viewers will grasp the new broadcast schedule.