For those of you who think golf begins and ends with Tiger Woods, you’re in for a treat this weekend.  CBS Sports is planning to show a 1963 match between Tiger’s idol, Jack Nicklaus, and Sam “Slammin’ Sammy” Snead.  At the time of the match, Snead was 50 years old, and held the PGA record of 81 wins, while Nicklaus was 23, and just beginning his rise to the top of the golf world.

Jack Nicklaus (Image: Zuma Press)

The match itself took place at the famed Pebble Beach Golf Links in Monterey, California, and was an 18 hole stroke play event.  Without giving away who won, let’s just say that the match came down to the final hole, with the winner dropping a decisive birdie putt.

The match hasn’t been rebroadcast in any way since 1963.  CBS plans on airing the event, renamed Nicklaus vs. Snead Revisited, on Sunday July 12th at 2 p.m., prior to the final round of the John Deere Classic.

I suggest that if you have the time, and the inclination, you sit down and watch this special match between two of the all time greats in the world of golf.  At the very least you will get a chance to see Jack Nicklaus in his prime, the first of his 18 majors under his belt, on his way to becoming arguably the greatest golfer of all time…for now.

Maybe it was the fact that the Masters fell on Easter weekend this year. Maybe it was the three-man play-off to end the tournament, or maybe it was the one-on-one battle between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson on the final nine. Whatever it was, viewers watched in numbers not seen since 2001.

CBS reports that more than 35.2 million viewers watched all or part of the third and fourth rounds of the Masters. That’s up 7% from last year. In fact, the broadcast garnered more viewers than any of last year’s major golf tournaments. Such interest can only bode well for golf.

(photo credit: Newscom)

It was announced yesterday that the Emmy® award-winning “The Amazing Race” television series will be made into a video game.

From the press release:

“The Amazing Race” video game teams players up in pairs for an unforgettable journey across exotic locations and continents in a race against time and other teams. Players work to find each checkpoint and take on dozens of frantic challenges and tasks as they navigate Detours, Roadblocks and other unpredictable game elements from the show. Working together strategically throughout the game is essential as each team tries to discover hidden clues that are crucial to getting them to the Pit Stop first- and one step closer to ultimate victory at the check-in mat.

I’ve gotta say that I have my doubts about this game. I usually don’t have a lot of faith in games that are based on TV shows. Who knows, maybe they’ll make me a believer. The game is set to launch along with the show’s 14th season.

Image|CBS

As more and more people turn to online video as their first screen of choice, the median ages of TV holdovers hits fifty. That’s outside advertisers’ prized 18-49 target demographic.

Check out the median ages for the big networks’ non-DVR viewers in the 2007-2008 TV season:

CBS: 54
ABC: 50
NBC: 49
Fox: 44

CBS’ cluefully aggressive online media purchases — from Wallstrip to CNet — suddenly make a lot more sense in light of these numbers. They’re the ones whose TV audience has furthest aged out of advertisers’ prized demographic. They’re the ones who most urgently need to get inside online media and find the younger audience advertisers want. Good on CBS for feeling that urgency and acting on it.

NBC and Fox, meanwhile, still have a few more years to clumsily dick around inside online video with their Hulu before advertisers don’t want their TV audience.

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.

CBS launches its new online news show: Mob Logic. Host Lindsay Campbell lends it the same candidly irreverent tone that made CBS acquisition Wallstrip a hit.

See, this is the kind of content that succeeds inside online video: shortform and conversational, not longform and one-sided. CBS knows this, and isn’t just relying on TV shovelware online.

CBS long ago proved that superdistributing their shows online helped their offline views. Turns out it helps their own online views, too.

ABC.com served the most videos in December, followed by CBS, NBC, and FOX. But CBS kept viewers around the longest:

ABC: 47.3 million videos, 28 million minutes

CBS: 33.8 million videos, 104 million minutes

NBC: 25.3 million videos, 62 million minutes

Fox: 1.4 million videos, 2 million minutes

ABC’s number one in terms of views; since they’ve learned viral shortform video with I’m Fucking Ben Affleck, expect that lead to widen. Looks like Hulu’s silo strategy isn’t working very well for NBC and Fox.

One of the greatest hurdles to TV networks embracing online video is the fear of offending their local affiliates. That’s what doomed Hulu.

Ever clueful in their approach to online video, CBS overcomes that hurdle with NCAA March Madness, making all 63 games available online. Last year, they put only 56 games live online in order to protect their local affiliates. Michael Learmonth explains their boldness:

The NCAA tournament has been one of CBS’s most successful forays on the web, drawing nearly 1.4 million users last year. And putting the games online is one of those moves that’s incredibly sensible, yet hard for big media companies to pull off: Most online viewing goes on at work, so it’s hard to argue that the Web will cannibalize TV audiences. And anyone who could watch the games on TV instead of a PC is obviously going to do so.

That last sentence is the obvious point that eludes most TV networks. Superdistribution FTW.

Lindsay Campbell recently left the hit financial show (and CBS acquisition) Wallstrip to host CBS’ upcoming political show Mob Logic. Irreverence is key to Wallstrip’s success, and it seems like Mob Logic will be every bit as irreverent as Wallstrip. Their latest teaser is a parody dub of Russian President Vladimir Putin.