It's March, which can only mean we're on the cusp of that Great American Workplace Productivity Suck known as the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. Usually, the three weeks of March Madness are passed by updating office-pool rankings, watching split-screen highlights on CBS, and checking if you still qualify for Yahoo's $1 million grand prize for submitting a perfect bracket.
But today, the college basketball bigwigs have upped the ante. In partnership with Thought Equity Motion, the NCAA has launched the aptly named Vault, which contains full, commercial-free footage of 150 tournament games from the past decade — every Sweet 16 game on to the championship from 2000 through last year. More so, engineers have indexed every game with nearly 6,000 combined metadata tags, so fans can easily filter incredible dunks, blocks, buzzer beaters and more. If you prefer, you can also sort by team, year or player.
More than anything, it's the blazing-fast video-loading and incredible wealth of metadata that make the site shine. Rather than just dropping in 45-second clips of individually great moments, clicking on a game clip will drop you directly into that moment in that game.
Say you want to relive Mario Chalmers' game-tying three for Kansas against Memphis in the 2008 championship. When you're done watching, you can just hunker down and let the game keep playing, on through the end of regulation and then overtime, all commercial-free and with nary a buffer. Of course, the site only works well if you have a large viewing screen, so those users hunched over a netbook or smallish laptop could find themselves constantly scrolling through their browser window while navigating the extensive UI.
The effort kicked off last summer, when Denver-based Thought Equity (which was already working on digitizing the NCAA's extensive archive) started collaborating with the NCAA on "how to unlock the value of NCAA.com," says Greg Weitekamp, the NCAA's director of broadcasting. "For a while, we were very protective of the copyright, and you have to be very careful in terms of allowing all that content out. As our relationship progressed, we started saying, 'Look, this is a digital world, the content can be out there, and it can help drive your fanbase.'"
The first time he entered the Vault, Weitekamp pulled up the 2007 Sweet 16 matchup between the University of Florida and Butler University, his alma mater. Before he knew it, 45 minutes had gone by and he was officially sucked in. "I thought, 'Well, if this is happening to me, I can't imagine how other people are going to love it,'" he says.
Kevin Schaff, Thought Equity's CEO, likens the Vault's capabilities to that of a "third generation" of sports-media–archive distribution, following in the path set forth by ESPN Classic and broadband. Both parties say it's possible that more men's basketball games -- as well as other collegiate sports -- could be added to the Vault over time. "The NCAA had the foresight to preserve every second of every game," Schaff points out, "and that sort of dedication allows these types of effort to come through."
Of course, the traffic numbers and ad dollars will have a lot of say in whether that expansion comes to fruition. "The business model will have to prove itself," Weitekamp says. "There's a lot of resources that have been put into it, and CBS is out there trying to sell out. So if it's successful, then naturally we'll expand it."
But starting today, fans can share Vault highlights with others using direct URLs, as well as having Click to Post functionality built in for Twitter and Facebook users. And with an accessible API, there's still more potential for the NCAA Vault as time goes on.
