Podcasts

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.

The WB lives on. Eighteen months after shutting down its TV network that captured the youth zeitgeist with such shows as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," Warner Bros. Television said Monday that it was resurrecting "the WB" vibe and moniker -- on the Internet. The Burbank-based television studio, part of the Time Warner Inc. empire, has been experimenting with ways to parlay its strength in TV programming onto the Web. Although earlier efforts sputtered, Warner Bros.

With the first four "Behind the Curtain at the LA Opera" podcasts drawing more than five times as many listeners as there are seats in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Opera says it will produce 14 more episodes, extending the series through the remainder of the 2006-07 season.

Clueless about Hawaii? The Volcano Radio podcast, www.volcanoradio.com, will steer you to places that those lucky enough to live in the islands know about. What's hot: The podcast is a little tourism and a lot island culture -- slack key guitar, pollution in the Ala Wai Canal in Waikiki, the scene in Chinatown, learning to surf in Waikiki. Husband-and-wife hosts Stewart Yerton and Malia Boyd keep things low-key and conversational.

As creator of "L.A. Law" and "Hill Street Blues," Steven Bochco packed lots of drama into 60 minutes. Now he's trying to entertain in closer to 60 seconds. Bochco is joining the masses of wannabe online video moguls with "Cafe Confidential," an Internet series that's all about brevity and punch. The 44-clip collection, which premieres today on video site Metacafe, features people in their teens or 20s telling lighthearted, semi-confessional stories.

By day, Richard Inman, captain of the East Fork Volunteer Fire Department, makes a living cleaning the pool and sweeping up at the Camp Williams mobile home park above Azusa, where he lives. Three nights a week, he's the "Mountain Man." The transformation starts at 7 p.m., when Inman's heavy metal and bluegrass radio show goes live from his trailer, which is so deep in the Angeles National Forest that he can't get cellphone reception.

TV Guide, which has helped viewers navigate through thousands of television shows for 53 years, now wants to do the same for Internet video. Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. next month will launch a test version of an online video search tool that will enable viewers to find clips and full episodes of TV shows posted on the Web. A formal launch is planned for September.

It's not easy being an online video site. You face competition from hundreds of rivals, joust with giant media companies' legal departments and rely mainly on amateurs to contribute clips you hope people will want to watch. But the executives behind Break.com, a Beverly Hills-based company whose site features such clips as "Girl Eats Praying Mantis" think they've found a way to attract buzz-worthy videos: Hire pros.

Comcast Corp. said it would provide clips from the Golf Channel, E! and other cable TV broadcasts to an online video site planned by News Corp. and NBC Universal, joining a project aimed at competing with Google Inc.'s YouTube. Comcast also will distribute the online video site through Comcast.net and Fancast.com, which is a new entertainment site launching this summer. Other companies that have signed on as distributors include Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL.