Courtesy New York Newsday

(March 20, 2009) On Ch. 2 in New York, CBS was busy with the final minutes of the LSU-Butler game yesterday, but at the top of their screens, fans could see there was a huge story developing:

Memphis, Final Four darling of Barack Obama and millions of other bracket-fillers, was life-and-death with Cal State-Northridge.

In the cramped room where executives make the call to move audiences around the nation, they were "tempted" to make the switch, executive VP Mike Aresco would say later.

But that would have been complex, because moving the Northeast also would have taken with it much of the Midwest and Southeast.

Many viewers were mighty frustrated, unable to see the potential upset unfold, but compared with the past, when such complaints regularly flooded the network, the response was relatively subdued.

That time-honored March tradition has faded as "March Madness on Demand," CBS' free online offering of every game, has evolved from something bordering on science fiction to a sports media institution.

"That product continues to exceed any expectations we had when we acquired those rights in 1999," CBS Sports president Sean McManus said.

Free, live sports video has boomed ever since MMOD was introduced in those quaint olden times of 2006 - from Amen Corner to the Beijing Olympics.

But it was CBS and the NCAAs that first demonstrated the Internet possibilities of an event contested weekday afternoons and thus able to tap the synergy of sports and goofing off at work.

Not all Web content can support itself only through advertising, as newspapers know too well. But the power of NCAA office pools alone made MMOD an ideal testing ground. (MMOD existed from 2003 to '05, but only as a lightly subscribed fee-based service.)

The "amazing phenomenon," as McManus called it, generated $4 million in advertising in 2006, about $10 million in '07 and $23 million last year; it is expected to surpass $30 million in '09.

"In this economy, to see that kind of growth on any product, especially in advertising, is phenomenal," McManus said.

Last year, MMOD had 4.8 million unique visitors, up 164 percent from 2007, about 90 percent coming in the workplace, with projections of another 50 percent rise this year.

Jason Kint, general manager of CBSSports.com, said late yesterday afternoon that based on early traffic, that 50 percent estimate might prove too conservative.

For all of the MMOD cheerleading, though, it wouldn't exist if CBS believed it seriously was eating into the financial stream that still dwarfs all others: games on broadcast TV, ad revenues from which will be 20 times larger than those for the Internet version.

Last year's tournament was the second-lowest-rated ever, barely edging 2003, early in the war with Iraq. But McManus insisted every study has shown there has been no "cannibalizing" of TV viewers.

"What we've found in all the research we've done is that it just builds interest," he said. "We think it actually increases our television viewership as opposed to decreasing it."

Said Kint: "This is additive, not cannibalistic."

CBS is able to do all this because it included digital rights in its current contract with the NCAA, which runs through 2013 and cost a still-staggering $6 billion. (The NCAA can open it up after next year's tournament.)

This year the network is offering what it describes as a "high definition-quality" video option, which Kint said about half of viewers chose on Day One.

Kint said the early returns also indicated one obvious trend from the early-afternoon window. Remember that Memphis scare?

"That game was at least twice as popular as the others," he said. "We could see people moving there."