Just in case you get stuck working this weekend, or you’re at the office late Monday night, don’t despair. For the first time ever, CBS College Sports Network and the NCAA will broadcast the Final Four over the Internet — also the first time that a major U.S. sporting event championship has been shown live online.

The Final Four will be available via the NCAA March Madness on Demand video player.

CBS and the NCAA have made each stage of the tournament available online with great success. From the First Round through the Elite 8, which sets up the Final Four, there have been 4.33 million total unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video player, a 147 percent increase over 2007. (tvover.net)

Not only that, but CBS and the NCAA note that 4.5 million hours of live streaming of video and audio have been consumed in the first eight days of the tournament, surpassing the entire 2007 total.

Since NCAA March Madness on Demand began in 2003, the first 56 games have been available online, but the Final Four has not. By the time that one team walks off the court with the championship — let’s hope it’s UCLA — all 63 games of the tournament will have been broadcast over-the-air and “in the cloud”.

Blinkx, the company behind the video search engine of the same name, has finally launched its Internet TV service, BBTV (Broadband TV). Like others in this increasingly crowded space, which includes Joost, Babelgum, VeohTV and HP-backed Next.TV, BBTV is a desktop application that utilizes Peer-to-Peer networking to deliver a full screen experience readily suited to long form content such as television episodes or feature films.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and not those of CBC/Radio-Canada.

Last week, CBC released an official DRM-free BitTorrent of a prime time show– a first for a major north American broadcaster (see last100 coverage). Since then we’ve been getting hundreds of emails of support and one clear resounding message: give us more. This begs the question, why aren’t broadcasters doing more? Why in the year 2008, seven years after BitTorrent’s birth and a lifetime in Internet years is this a groundbreaking thing? Let’s break down what it takes to get a legal torrent going and maybe we’ll get some answers.