• by Wayne Friedman , March 26, 2013

Live streaming video activity continues to rack up soaring results over a year ago for the CBS and Turner’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament -- with live streaming unique visitors now amounting to about half that of the average traditional TV viewers.

For the first week of the NCAA Tournament, CBS and Turner say there have been 4.2 million unique visitors watching live video across all platforms, up from 1.6 million a year ago. CBS and Turner say the research data came from Adobe Site Catalyst for broadband usage, and Conviva for mobile.

By way of comparison, traditional TV coverage has pulled in 8.9 million total average TV viewers for the first six days of the basketball tournament -- which the companies have said are at the highest level since 1993. This TV average was 9% higher than the 8.2 million gained by the two TV networks a year ago. 

Looking at all digital platforms, the “NCAA March Madness Live” digital effort more than doubled its live streams of the basketball games over a year ago to 36.6 million for the first week of the event. A year ago for the same period, the big event pulled in 18.3 million video streams. 

Specifically, the use of mobile devices is gaining versus other digital broadband devices. Over 105 minutes of live video was consumed per user on broadband -- a gain of 12% over a year ago -- and 61 minutes of video was viewed per user on mobile tablets and smartphones, a 42% hike over  2012.

Overall, there have been a collective 10 million hours of live video streaming -- a nearly 200% increase versus a year ago.

The most popular games — in terms of live video streams: Valparaiso-Michigan State, 1,844,000; Bucknell-Butler, 1,784,000; Mississippi-Wisconsin, 1,778,000;  Albany-Duke, 1,488,000; and  Davidson-Marquette, 1,487,000.