CBS shares Final Four

When Final Four action begins Saturday, fans who want to watch the games live online will have to head to CBSSports .com, which owns exclusive online rights to the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Or to ESPN.com, SI.com or even Facebook.

This year, for the first time, CBS is allowing hundreds of websites to add a button that, with one click, sends visitors to the streamed games. But fans can move back again, seamlessly, as UCLA graduate student Mike De Land did on Facebook during the early rounds.

"Facebook is sort of becoming everyone's home page," De Land said of the social networking site where he and his buddies do a bit of hoops trash talk. "So for them to make it as convenient as possible for people to start at Facebook, where people have their brackets and pools, makes sense. It's really smart."

Although CBS declined to say how many fans have so far used the buttons to jump over, the game streamed through last weekend's games drew 4.3 million unique visitors -- a 147% increase over 2007.

Those visitors have watched 4.6 million hours online so far, which is good news for CBS, which this year has seen an 11% drop in television ratings for the early rounds.

The network blames the drop on blowouts and the absence of some regional fan favorites. But it expects a ratings rebound for Saturday's Final Four because, for the first time since the brackets were seeded in 1979, all four No. 1s are in: North Carolina, Kansas, UCLA and Memphis.

"You've got three programs that are college basketball royalty and a fourth team, Memphis, that has been front and center all year," said Michael Aresco, senior vice president of programming for CBS Sports. "With teams of this high caliber, all of the games should be very competitive."

The weak television ratings underscore the assist that big media hopes to get from online advertising.

Online, it's all about attracting visitors and keeping them for as long as possible. "We had never done anything like this before," said John Kosner, vice president and general manager of ESPN Digital.

The gambit, however, paid off during early round action when website traffic was up by 20% from last year, Kosner said.

The concept is to capture, share and recapture college basketball fans -- a strategy that could benefit all the participating media companies, not just CBS, which is in the middle of a $6-billion, 11-year media rights deal for March Madness and other NCAA championships.