MADNESS - BASKETBALL ON OFFICE MONITORS MADNESS FOR BUSINESS

A leading business consultant has predicted that CBS's online "March Madness On-Demand," in which it is streaming all 63 final college basketball games free, will cost American businesses about $1.7 billion in lost productivity. Rick Cobb, a vice president at business consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told Newsweek magazine that the estimate is based on the number of workers known to participate in office pools and CBS's figures showing that 1.4 million unique online viewers watched on aver age 1.9 hours of its coverage last year. Predicting that that number will rise substantially this year, Cobb said another source of lost productivity could be office servers unable to deal with demands for the webcasts -- and crashing. "When servers go down , most people want to head home," he observed.

21/03/2008