ATLANTA—March Madness, the NCAA’s annual men’s basketball tournament, will officially tip off March 17, and Turner Sports and the NCAA have rolled out a slew of new features for its NCAA March Madness Live streaming app to give fans as much of the action as they can take.
First, March Madness Live will be available across 17 platforms this year, including Google Assistant for the first time, giving fans direct access to live coverage of tournament games.
As far as the new features, the highlight is a Multigame option added to Amazon Fire TV and Android TV platforms that will enable fans to watch simultaneous live coverage of two games during certain windows. Previously, this option had only been available on Apple TV. Another live video addition is the new Catch-Up video powered by AT&T TV, which will provide a summary of key plays or moments that occurred before a viewer started watching the live stream coverage.
March Madness Live will also now help viewers keep track of their bracket predictions during live game coverage. Through either the Watch Page, Gamecenter or with push notifications, viewers can be reminded of the outcomes they predicted during games. In Gamecenter, users can also follow their Bracket Challenge group leaderboards, including access to private chats with other group participants.
For the third consecutive year there will also be the Fast Break feature, providing live tournament action from a single viewing location via “whip-around” coverage with quick turnaround highlights, real-time analysis, social reaction and commentary for all games. Fast Break will be available during the first two rounds of the tournament (March 19-22).
Additional features for the March Madness Live streaming app includes Path to Championship analysis of brackets; Matchup Analysis to help users personalize their bracket picks based on more than 20 stat categories; close-game alerts; live game scoring; and direct access to live radio broadcasts, courtesy of Westwood One, for all 67 games.
Fans can access Turner Sports and CBS Sports’ coverage of all 67 games through CBS web and mobile platforms, as well as live on traditional TV and digital platforms for TBS, CBS, TNT and truTV.
