Oh, did you know that there’s this basketball something-or-other going on?
Let’s skip to the point. Tomorrow, the NCAA March Madness games start up. For the past few years, the tech media and the NOC teams have been worried about the impact that the games, streamed live over the Internet – and the networks buckled under the streaming recreational traffic.
This year will be the first year in which those streamed games will be Internet broadcast in High Definition.
But to be brutally honest, I don’t think that March Madness will make as big an impact as it did in earlier years – and this has to do with changes in networking philosophies as well as a broader cultural shift.
Six years ago, the first March Madness on Demand hit an Internet completely unused to the idea of streaming video as mainstream. Sure, I remember attempts to sell WWF (now WWE) events via the Internet to college students unable to order them via pay-per-view as far back as 1998, but neither the infrastructure nor the expectation was there; even if we had H.264 encoding back during those halcyon days, we didn’t have the processing power on our client machines to decode it.
But compared to only a couple of years ago, we’re simply used to the idea that you can get video on your computer. There isn’t an HDTV sold in the U.S. that can’t take a computer input via a $30 HDMI cable. When we’ve got nothing better to do, we’re just as likely to YouTube surf than channel surf – and YouTube has videos in 720p – the better to match the 720p videos we’re making with $150 cameras. CBS doesn’t just show March Madness – there’s full episodes of Survivor, The Price Is Right, the Caruso Show (a.k.a. CSI:Miami) – the only show I couldn’t find a full episode of was “Game Show In My Head,” and that’s probably because no one wants to watch “Game Show In My Head.”
ABC, Fox, and NBC also have shows online, not just including Hulu. Great worldly events such as, say, the presidential Inauguration – are also online. And when we think of video on the Internet, we’re not just thinking about entertainment – we’re thinking about medical and enterprise applications made possible by technologies such as Cisco Telepresence. If your network is able to handle all of that – if you’re monitoring and managing your network so that all the other recreational network traffic doesn’t kill it, then March Madness simply isn’t the specter that it once was.
Technologically, our Internet infrastructure is faster, our ability to manage the network is better, and television? Television’s dying. “TV shows” are in name only, and they are “Internet Video Shows.”
So I wouldn’t worry too much about March Madness this year. What damage it could cause was because of its anomalous nature. Now it’s just part of the status quo. If you’re worried about the impact of March Madness, at best, this is a wakeup call. At worst, you’re lagging behind your competitors.
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