CBS Sports

If “multiplatform” is truly the sports media buzzword of the past year, then CBS Sports has to be recognized as having one of the best years of any broadcast sports division, turning in stellar performances on broadcast TV, cable TV and online.

The real success story came with the tournament games that CBS Sports streamed online with its March Madness On Demand. The service recorded 4.76 million unique visitors during the tournament, representing a 164 percent increase from the previous year. CBS executives said those numbers translated to nearly $25 million in revenue.

And don’t forget CBS Sports’ cable channel, CBS College Sports (formerly CSTV), which carried two tournament games for the second year in a row.

“The wide array of CBS’s presence in today’s media marketplace speaks to its diversification from tried-and-true prime-time presence to its most progressive approach in viral webcasting of the NCAA championship,” said Greg Shaheen, senior vice president of basketball and business strategies for the NCAA.

“Its foundation of approaching every broadcast with a commitment to quality, to reinventing itself to develop, deliver and own more content with every passing day, is a credit not only to the rich tradition where CBS has been, but where it has committed to go in the near term.”

Led by the likable Sean McManus, CBS Sports is known for having outstanding relationships with the many properties it has deals with.

That’s one of the reasons it was able to quietly re-work its rights deal with the U.S. Tennis Association a little more than a year ago, getting the association to agree to a lower rights fee in exchange for revenue sharing and commitments to broadcast other USTA tournaments.