CBS and ESPN Quarrel Over Size of Sports Streams

The streaming of live sports events drew two media conglomerates, CBS and ESPN, into a Friday fracas — one that may sound silly but that underscored how important the business has become as people increasingly watch games away from their TV screens.

Through its CBSSports.com division, CBS has found great success by streaming the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament under the March Madness on Demand rubric.

It is free to any user with a broadband connection.

ESPN is using the World Cup to fuel the power of its ESPN3.com online network, which streams 3,500 sports events a year, including baseball, the N.B.A., college football and cricket. It is free to anyone whose Internet service provider compensates ESPN.

“The World Cup is a breakthrough event for what we’re trying to do in digital media,” said John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager for ESPN Digital Media. “It’s making watching games on a P.C. a mainstream activity.”

On Thursday, ESPN said that the 1.1 million unique visitors who streamed the United States’ victory over Algeria the day before represented a record for a live sports event.

On Friday, CBS said ESPN was wrong. CBS insisted that the 1.15 million visitors who streamed Brigham Young’s double-overtime win over Florida in a first-round tournament game in March stands as the real record.

ESPN then went granular to try to prove that its World Cup game was the true sports stream king. Citing time spent by each fan watching the game, ESPN calculated that the United States victory over Algeria was seen by an average of 328,000 viewers a minute, while the N.C.A.A. game was seen by just over 200,000.

CBSSports.com stood firm, saying it “has confirmed” that the Florida-B.Y.U. game “is the single largest online sports event in terms of total audience in 2010.”

This little battle raises an intriguing question: isn’t 1.15 million visitors for a first-round tournament game an astonishing feat compared with a soccer game featuring the United States team playing in an event marketed by ESPN as it never has any other?

Both were shown during the day, when fans are more likely to be at work than at home, increasing the likelihood that they are watching on a computer, not a television.

But while the two tournaments are similar in structure, they are different to an American audience. The 1.15 million streaming the N.C.A.A. game illustrated the annual mania that surrounds the basketball tournament in small and large markets. Yet it takes the quadrennial presence of the World Cup to get large TV or online audiences for soccer in America.

Still, the size of the crowd that surfed to the United States-Algeria game on ESPN3.com cannot be discounted; it represented the equivalent of about 16 percent of the game’s TV audience.

ESPN3.com streams live sports 24 hours a day, unlike CBSSports.com, which streams parts of the Masters golf tournament live, or NBC, which streams “Sunday Night Football” live and the Olympics (some live, some delayed).

MLB.com streams games but charges subscribers a seasonal fee. Its technology infrastructure began to stream ESPN3.com’s many offerings in April.

Currently, ESPN3.com is juggling live streams from the World Cup, Wimbledon, the College World Series, Australian rules football and Major League Lacrosse.

ESPN3.com (formerly ESPN360.com) was begun as the online equivalent of a cable channel, but one that “theoretically had an infinite capacity for live events,” Kosner said.

But it operates much like an ESPN cable channel, collecting advertising and subscriber fees. The cable sports empire did not want to give its content away free. “That didn’t make sense,” Kosner said. “The more people who watched, the more you’d pay for bandwidth costs and you’d be totally dependent on advertising.”

In seeking fees from Internet providers, like cable and satellite operators, for ESPN3.com, it has run into some who have refused, like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision, who have also said no to carrying the NFL Network. Maureen Huff, a Time Warner Cable spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message that the cable operator did not like the ESPN3.com business model.

“We’ve always said that we think that the content has an appeal to sports fans,” she wrote, “but we believe that our customers ought to be able to access the Internet without being forced to pay for programming that they might never watch.”

ESPN3.com has about 52 million subscribers but is free to more than 20 million college students connected to campus educational networks and to on-base military personnel.

It recently expanded its audience with a deal to stream its events through Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles; it will be available free to subscribers of the Xbox Live membership service. “When Microsoft did research about their audience,” Kosner said, “they found a greater preponderance of sports events than it expected.”

He said that ESPN3.com — built with the digital rights negotiated with TV and radio rights — was a profitable service now experiencing “significant advertising growth.”