NCAA Men’s Basketball March Madness returned to CBS and Turner in 2016 and featured an epic National Championship matchup between Villanova and North Carolina that racked up 17.8 million viewers. Ahead of the the tournament, Reality Check Systems produced an all new graphics package driven by proprietary software, scripts and several of our Bullet mobile graphics workstations. The workflow facilitated data-driven graphics for 67 tournament broadcasts, including social media elements for the Final Four and National Championship game broadcasts, in addition to studio shows across CBS, truTV, TNT and TBS.

Collaboration with the networks began early to ensure seamless production across pre-, post- and in-game coverage between CBS’s New York studio, Turner’s Atlanta facility and more than nine remote locations for the first week of games all the way through to the National Championship game in Houston. Leading up to the tournament, we developed 230 unique elements – including swooping data driven super brackets, lower thirds, a score bar, full screens, video boxes and more – and 120 interface scripts for the graphics, with rendered designs provided by King and Country.

Prior to and throughout the tournament, we traveled to the March Madness broadcast hub at CBS’ New York Broadcast Center to provide training and on-demand technical support. 2016 marked our sixth consecutive year providing graphics production technology and services for the CBS and Turner Sports tournament broadcasts.

Team Stream, a feed featuring custom tailored graphics for each competing team on TNT and truTV respectively, made its mark once again, appearing in both the Final Four and National Championship game broadcasts this year. Powered by new RCS templates, Spredfast social software and Vizrt’s Social TV, TeamStream enhanced the networks’ storytelling capabilities – facilitating the display of and interactive commentary on real-time Tweets, Vines, Instagram videos and polls. With TeamStream in play, social video views increased fivefold and 56 million impressions were made across March Madness social accounts on Twitter and Facebook during the National Championship Game.