March Madness is a winner for Turner which showed big numbers on TV and streaming. The Final Four matchup between the University of North Carolina and Duke drew 16.3 million viewers. Turner said that the game was the second most-viewed college basketball telecast in the history of cable TV. College basketball has become more of a cable staple through multiple league distribution deals with the ESPN family of networks as well as Fox Sports and RSNs. This year’s Final Four is exclusively on TBS as part of the deal between CBS and Turner to broadcast the tournament that sees NBA and college sports personalities work together to provide blanket coverage of every game of the 64 team tournament live.
Within the viewing number, it was reported that the March Madness app, which integrates multiple channels into one interface to make it easy to find the games as they happen, had 1.4 million concurrent streams during the UNC-Duke tilt. The report did not break TV numbers down to reflect how many people used cable replacement services such as Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV or YouTube TV, which also offer TBS as part of their streaming TV packages.
