CBS, TNT, TBS and truTV are averaging 8.5 million viewers through the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, down from last year's record-setting pace, but still the fourth-best average through the first Sunday in 22 years. This year's average also is below the 9.23 million viewers seen during the first week of the '14 tourney, and down from 8.9 million viewers in '13. Meanwhile, March Madness Live continues to see record numbers for streaming. Through Sunday, there have been 56 million live video starts and 12.8 million live hours of video consumption on March Madness Live -- both all-time records. Duke-UNC Wilmington, the opening game on Thursday, set a record for an individual game with 5.5 million live video streams. March Madness social media channels to date have garnered 175 million impressions across Facebook and Twitter, up 49% from the same period last year. Data from Nielsen Social also shows that Middle Tennessee State's upset win over Michigan State last Friday afternoon was the most-tweeted sports event last week. The game saw 400,000 event-related tweets sent in the U.S. that were seen by a unique audience of 6.4 million people during a time frame that spanned three hours before the game to three hours after it ended. Yale's upset of Baylor last Thursday was No. 2 as far as most-tweeted sports events of the week, as 206,000 tweets were sent out, seen by a unique audience of 5.3 million people (Austin Karp, Assistant Managing Editor).
CHARLES IN CHARGE: In N.Y., Bob Raissman writes under the header, "Charles Barkley Spices Up Boring March Madness Coverage." The college hoops crowd "never has appreciated Barkley's spontaneity, his ability to inform, instigate and entertain." Collage basketball fans "view their audience in a monolithic sense -- one nation, indivisible, consumed with X’s and O’s." That definition "ignores the rest of us eyeballs who also want to laugh, get angry, and be entertained." There are "plenty of places to get the technical stuff, including broadcast venues that don’t have rights to air the tournament." There is "only one place to go to get Barkley." Meanwhile, as long as Turner and CBS are "paying an army of voices to work the tournament, they should add another -- an unofficial referee." Raissman: "Go the NFL route and hire a go-to guy for the tourney and bring him on air when there are questions about rules and calls" (N.Y. DAILY NEWS, 3/22).
