Due to the overwhelming popularity of the service, CBS SportsLine and Akamai (akamai.com) have doubled the amount of bandwidth available from 80GB to 160GB for viewing NCAA tournament games this year to accommodate for a higher volume of traffic. The network, however, will still have to limit the number of viewers to ensure the system runs efficiently.

Now in its fifth year, March Madness on Demand (ncaasports.com/mmod) offers college basketball fans a chance to tune in to watch any one of the 56 "out of market" games played within the first three rounds of the tournament.

CBS SportsLine is offering video streams of as many as four different games being played simultaneously. However, the network is forced to adhere to local "blackout" rules that prevent Internet users from watching a game online that is already airing on their local affiliate television station, in an effort to prevent advertising dollars from being wasted.

Last year marked the first time the network has offered MMOD for free, delivered largely by content delivery networks Akamai and Limelight Networks (limelightnetworks.com), and, as CBS SportsLine spokesman Alex Riethmiller reports, the service was "met with tremendous enthusiasm".

"We had 1.3 million people sign up for the product last year," says Riethmiller. "Over the course of the tournament those 1.3 million people visited the MMOD player over 5 million times. And during those 5 million-plus visits they streamed over 19 million video streams of both live and archive video."

To better prepare the high volume of visitor traffic, CBS SportsLine is also boosting the video streaming quality from 400kbps to 450kbps and increasing the size of the MMOD player by approximately 50 percent. These increases will consume some of the added bandwidth, says Riethmiller.

The site will be able to accommodate up to 300,000 simultaneous viewers at any given time - a significant increase from last year's 200,000 viewers, says Riethmiller. After that limit is reached, viewers will then be directed to online "waiting rooms" until enough users exit to allow space for new ones to file in.

"Because this is very much an appointment-based viewing," says Riethmiller, "and [because] there will be a tremendous amount of people trying to access the product, we have this waiting room where we can put everyone that wants to access the product and slowly let them in an orderly fashion that keeps the video running smoothly and the user experience at a very high level."

Maintaining quality, on-demand video of the NCAA tournament is a crucial component for CBS in keeping its viewers - and in turn, its advertisers - satisfied. After generating $4 million in online advertising last year, CBS SportsLine says that it will likely double that figure for 2007 with its nearly 30 advertisers, which include Dell, Marriot, State Farm, Pontiac and its newest sponsor, Cingular Wireless.

In terms of projecting the amount of visitor traffic it will receive, Mark Kortekaas, chief technical officer for CBS Interactive, says that it is anyone's guess.

"We also don't know how the games are going to run and how the tournament is going to run," says Kortekaas. "There are a lot of factors that would go along with that, anyways."

"It's kind of like the ratings for television," says Riethmiller. "You can have the best production TV staff in the world, but if for some reason Virginia Commonwealth ends up playing Albany in the finals, it's not going to get as high a rating as Ohio State versus Wisconsin, or something like that."