March Madness Live will expand to connected TV platforms for the first time as part of its '16 deployment by Turner Sports. This year’s digital streaming of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament will expand to Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire in addition to existing distribution on computers, tablets and smartphones. The March Madness Live app on the connected TV platforms will require user authentication for games shown on Turner Sports networks, as they do on the other platforms. Tournament games shown by CBS will be shown in the network’s own CBS All Access connected TV app, but will remain in the March Madness Live experience on other digital platforms. The addition of connected TV is expected to help provide a further boost to March Madness Live traffic that reached a record 80.7 million streams and 17.8 million hours of consumption in '15.
“We know we’ll see lift from connected TV,” said Turner Sports Senior VP/Digital Mark Johnson. “We knew we had to get there and there is a great deal of fan interest in these platforms. It’s also a continuation of a trend we’ve continued to see with users streaming multiple games on multiple devices simultaneously.”
