Mediaboss Marketing

NEW YORK (AP) -- Madness is one way to describe my experience with March Madness Live, a service for watching the annual college basketball tournament on computers and mobile devices.

Don't get me wrong. The features were great, and video quality was decent. But it wasn't easy figuring out how to get the games I was entitled to watch for free.

CBS and Turner Sports were smart to continue offering live video coverage beyond the TV. After all, many of the tournament's early games took place during the workday, when many people aren't near TVs or don't want to make it too obvious they're goofing off.

What's changed is that there's now a fee to watch the games via March Madness Live, with some exceptions. Fans may detest having to pay for something that used to be free, but $3.99 for all 67 men's games is a good deal. It's a one-time fee, so you don't get charged again for the iPad if you've already paid for access on the computer.

ON COMPUTERS:

March Madness Live offers extensive access to the tournament, starting with the March 11 selections of teams and concluding with a practice session this Friday and the Final Four on Saturday and Monday.

Visit http://ncaa.com/march-madness to launch March Madness Live in a separate browser window.

From there, you can get a schedule of games and check your picks. You get displays of both teams' Twitter feeds and tools for easily posting messages or video clips on Facebook or Twitter.

You can watch any of the games live or get a full replay afterward, all with commercials. Unfortunately, you can't pause or rewind live video. It felt like TV before I bought a TiVo digital-video recorder in 2001. Stats on individual players are also available, and a scoreboard at the top gives you frequent updates to other games.

For those at work, hitting the "Boss Button" temporarily replaces the video window with a fake email, including a humorous one pretending to be a scam to get your password information for March Madness Live. Or you can play it safe and just listen to audio produced for radio stations, while pretending to be stuck in an endless conference call.

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