Basketball Through the Net May Cause Madness at Work

Add March Madness to the woes of corporate technology managers, those oft-maligned computer experts appreciated only when e-mail goes kaput or a PC devours a day’s work.

When the NCAA basketball championship gets into full swing Thursday, some fear Internet broadcasts of the tournament could overwhelm company networks and slow down work for everybody -- not just hoops-loving shirkers.

“It wouldn’t take more than four or five people opening up a few basketball games before we noticed an issue,” said Paul Roche, chief information officer for a small Illinois paper products distributor.

As the entertainment industry experiments with pushing television shows, movie clips, music and sporting events over the Internet to workaday drones, Roche and other technology managers are the guinea pigs. That experiment moves out of the lab this week as CBS Corp. makes many of this month’s college basketball broadcasts available for free on the Internet.

Web watchers expect it to be the most popular live event ever streamed over the Internet.

“You don’t have TVs in every office, but you do have computers in every office with high-speed Internet access,” said Larry Kramer, president of CBS Digital Media.

Problem is, online video taxes computer networks like almost nothing else. Plus, it gives desk jockeys yet another digital distraction.

When use of desktop PCs exploded in the 1990s, workers who would never play cards at their desks thought nothing of clicking computer solitaire for hours on end. By 2005, one of the busiest online shopping days was the Monday after Thanksgiving -- when workers returned to their high-speed connections at the office.

Today, with websites such as YouTube.com offering thousands of coffee-break-sized videos, there are more ways than ever to procrastinate.

“Video is inherently a greater distraction than just checking scores,” said Mike Newman, vice president and general counsel of Websense Inc., a San Diego maker of Internet filtering software. Newman noted that CBS’ basketball service allows users to display several games at once. “With three games going on in your cube, give a guy a beer and he’s in a sports bar now.”

And unlike offline time-wasters, online video can slow down a slacker’s co-workers. Think of a computer network as electronic freeways for data. Only so many bits of information can move along it at any given time. If there’s too much data, the system slows down -- much like rush hour on the 405.

For its part, CBS plans to cap the number of people who can view games simultaneously to ensure higher video quality. Fans who sign in late will have to wait for someone to leave a game before they can watch.

That should mitigate the strain on networks, but it doesn’t take much to clog traffic.

“You throw just one or two streaming media feeds into the mix and all of a sudden you’re bumping up against your bandwidth limitations,” said Paul Myer, president of 8e6 Technologies, an Orange-based Internet filtering company. “In a medium-sized company it’s not unheard of for one person who’s streaming a video feed to affect network performance by 20 or 30%.”

To guard against that, more than 80% of companies have written policies governing Internet usage at work, according to a survey last year by the American Management Assn. and training and consulting firm EPolicy Institute. More than three-quarters of companies monitor their employees’ Web surfing habits. And nearly two-thirds use software to block inappropriate sites.

March Madness prompted Omni Duct Systems Inc., an Anaheim company that manufactures heating and air conditioning ducts for contractors, to block access to sports sites. Technology managers can also block specific sites selectively.

The company’s four branches share a single Internet connection and bandwidth comes at a premium. The last thing Omni’s information technology manager, Mike Delawder, wanted to deal with was 150 employees using the company’s computers to check their standing in office pools.

“It removes temptation,” he said. “People don’t have access to it. If it’s not critical to their job function, why put it in their way?”

If more employers follow Delawder’s lead, it could hinder the explosive growth of online entertainment, which studios, networks and record labels are counting on to boost ad revenue and build loyalty.

“Years ago it was a sin to make a personal phone call at the office,” “Survivor” creator Mark Burnett, who is creating an online game show with America Online, told the Los Angeles Times in January.

“Now, people are online all day long at the workplace. More people are hooked up electronically to receive images on that little box from 9 to 5 than will ever tune in to TV at night.”

But be careful, warned Nancy Flynn, executive director of the EPolicy Institute. Even if an office allows online video, workers should consult corporate guidelines -- and not take advantage.

“I would not be surprised if there were some basketball fans out there who ended up getting canned.”

Internet broadcasts of the games will be available only to people in markets where the games aren’t on TV. And the service won’t feature the Elite Eight, Final Four or championship rounds, when there’s only one game on at a time.