CBS hails itself as “America’s Most Watched Network,” and part of that is no doubt due to the huge ratings they get from the second week in March until the first weekend in April. CBS has had the rights to the NCAA Tournament for as long as I can remember. And, for as long as I can remember, the coverage of the tournament has been atrocious. This year is no exception.

Over the years, CBS has tried many different strategies to try to appease the March Madness masses. A while back, they had a gimmick where they would show you the tip-off of every game, using a split-screen with the game you were watching to bring you the tip live. This was a poor idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, in the mid-90’s, most television screens were much smaller than they are today and there was no such thing as high definition so the split screen effect made it harder to see the action. But, a larger problem occurred when CBS would bring in the new game as it was about to get underway. In order to to keep the proportions right, each image was reduced to about 1/4 of the original size, so in essence you couldn’t see either game, much less distinguish which team actually got the first possession of the game. And, besides, no one really cares who wins the jump ball anyway.

More recently, they have begun to show the games online, so if your team is not being televised, you can still watch the game. They had a few kinks at first, in that they would not let you watch your own region’s game, which got problematic when CBS opted to change away from your region’s game. But this year CBS allowed you to watch any game regardless of region live online. While this is certainly a step in the right direction, the technology is not quite there yet. Internet speeds are still not fast enough to make watching a game online as continuous as a televised game is. Besides the jerky quality, there is a significant delay in their “live” coverage. In other words, if you are trying to watch whatever game was being shown on CBS and a game on the computer simultaneously, you will know the score of the online game almost a full minute before you see the basket on your laptop, thanks to the continuous score ticker on TV.

For all the various methods CBS has tried to make the tournament more enjoyable, they have yet to employ the most obvious one: use multiple channels. ABC recently brought us all 64 games the 2006 FIFA World Cup in high-definition on three channels, ensuring that anyone with ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 could watch any game they wanted live. For as bad as NBC’s Olympic coverage can be, they have at least figured out to allow the viewer to choose whether he wants to watch curling or the ski jump. Even Fox has used their sister network FX to deal with Major League Baseball playoff games.

The strangest part of it all is that CBS stands to benefit the most from this strategy. More games on more channels means more potential viewers, and, more importantly, more commercial slots. Perhaps CBS is unable to use other channels, seeing as they do not have as extensive a cable connection as ABC or NBC. Perhaps CBS is unaware of the need to change, totally unaware of how flawed their system is. Or perhaps they are unwilling, simply too afraid that moving games from CBS to a different station might forever lose them the title of “America’s Most Watched Network.”