A cord-cutter’s guide to March Madness
The madness that is the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is set to tip off next week.
Even if you’ve cut the pay-TV cord, there are many ways to score streaming access to the action.
CBS Sports and Turner Sports will televise all 67 games of the March Madness tournament, from the First Four games Tuesday and Wednesday on truTV at 6 p.m. ET to the national championship game April 2 on TBS at 9 p.m. ET.
To see every game, you will need CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV channels — included on most pay-TV packages.
If you are among the 21% of U.S. TV households that don’t subscribe to cable, satellite or fiber-delivered pay TV, according to Leichtman Research Group, you will have to check the growing lineup of Internet-streamed subscription services such as YouTube TV to make sure they have the channels you want.
Some of those services, such as YouTube TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, let you sign in to the networks’ NCAA March Madness Live app on mobile and TV streaming devices to watch all the games.
“If I’m a fan of the tournament, I’m going to watch it everywhere I can, and it just depends on what suits me at the time and where I am,” said Hania Poole, vice president and general manager of NCAA Digital. “I’m a really big believer ... and we have enough data to know, it’s about meeting the fan where they are.”
The digital audience has grown. About 98 million viewers livestreamed last year’s tournament, 33% more than in 2016, Poole said.
Overall, fans watched about 20 million live video hours last year, up 10% from the year before.
If your TV package includes CBS and the Turner channels, you will be able to use your pay-TV credentials to watch all the games on March Madness Live on the Web.
Those who don’t have a traditional pay-TV subscription need a strategy if there are certain games and channels they want to watch.
All CBS games are available to watch for free on March Madness Live on the Web, including smartphones and tablets. To watch the games televised on the other networks via March Madness Live, you need the log-in credentials that come along with a pay-TV subscription.
If you don’t have a pay-TV service and want to watch the CBS games using a streaming TV device such as Apple TV, you need to use CBS All Access. It costs $5.99 a month after a free seven-day trial.
Most streaming services, like March Madness Live, are available on a wide variety of streaming devices, including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast and other Android devices, such as NVIDIA Shield and some game systems.