CBS Sports Chair Sean McManus yesterday said the NCAA has made a series of reforms to ensure Sunday's Selection Show will not see a repeat of last year’s leaked bracket that marred the program. “It’s more the NCAA’s issue than us, but they have taken steps to correct what happened,” McManus said. “They’ve constricted the pool of people who have the bracket (ahead of the show) so that it’s smaller than ever, and I’m confident they have their arms around this and we won’t have a leak.” CBS Sports is also trimming the Selection Sunday program to 90 minutes, a half hour shorter than last year, with the majority of brackets slated to be unveiled in the first 30 minutes. McManus said, “We tried something new last year, and I think we probably underestimated the desire of the fans to see the brackets as soon as possible. So we’ll go back to what we’ve done before, and have the vast majority of the selections out in the first half hour, and then move more toward the analysis.” Last year’s tournament selection show generated its lowest viewership on record and the longer format generated a spate of negative reviews.
LET THE MADNESS BEGIN: Turner Sports is projecting further increases in consumption to its March Madness Live streaming service, which this year will be deployed on an event record 15 platforms. This year’s digital distribution of the tournament includes Amazon Alexa devices and the Xbox platform for the first time. But connected TV devices, added last year for the first time, are quickly growing into a critical part of the overall March Madness Live plan. This year will see the introduction of an interactive bracket on Apple TV that provides direct access to live games. “The connected TV platforms are probably where we’re seeing our biggest segment of growth year over year across all the devices,” said Turner Sports Senior VP/Digital Mark Johnson. The tournament will also be another significant step in the ongoing development of iStreamPlanet, the streaming infrastructure outfit Turner acquired in ’15. Turner Sports will migrate the back-end support of MML to iStreamPlanet this year, following similar moves with other products such as the NBA’s League Pass. Turner Sports is also planning a return of the virtual reality coverage of the tournament introduced last year.
