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Move to cable costs NCAA championship game viewers

NEW YORK – Compared to last year, Jim Nantz lost more than half his audience with the NCAA men’s basketball championship game’s move from CBS to cable television’s TBS.

Just under 13.9 million people watched Villanova’s last-second victory over North Carolina on TBS last week, which used the CBS basketball crew of Nantz, Grant Hill and Bill Raftery, the Nielsen company said. The 2015 final between Duke and Wisconsin, shown on CBS, had 28.3 million viewers.

The Turner networks split the audience for the final game, showing telecasts with team-specific announcing teams on TNT and Tru TV. Add in those viewers, and the final was seen by a total of 17.8 million people. CBS did not provide the team-specific streams of the final game last year, not wanting to dilute its audience, but that wasn’t an issue with Turner owning TBS, TNT and Tru TV.

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