CBS Makes $23M from Streaming March Madness

Once again, CBS CEO Les Moonves reaps the benefits of his courage inside online video. Streaming all the NCAA March Madness games earned CBS $23 million in revenue. They guessed (correctly) that this particular content was very well-suited to the availability of the medium: 92 percent of online basketball watching was done at work, “demonstrating that we are adding a whole new audience to our existing content and making bosses throughout America very angry with us,” says the ever-irreverent Moonves.

Favoring the superdistribution of online video over the artificial scarcity of TV has paid off for CBS so far. Abundance leads to value, baby.