Employers have long suspected that the NCAA® men’s basketball tournament was the cause of lost productivity – not to mention bandwidth – as workers streamed games online to their computer during working hours. Experian Simmons DataStream confirms that use of streaming online video among March Madness fans rose a relative 23% from the start of the tournament in 2009 through the championship game. Meanwhile, non-fans who didn’t watch or plan on watching any of the basketball games showed no increase in use of online streaming video. In fact, there is actually a slight dip in streaming video use among non-March Madness viewers during the nearly month-long tournament.
