Basketball fans, online sports video just hit a new milestone: the NCAA's March Madness national championship college basketball tournament will be streaming in HD this year, and it's all free. If you have the bandwidth — you'll need to be able to sustain around 1.5Mbps, which is not all that fast — you can load up Microsoft's version of Flash called Silverlight as you see in the graphic above, and enjoy the festivities in sweet HDTV.

You can also watch the NCAA basketball tournament in good old standard-def just like you did last year, too, coming at you in 550Kbps goodness and advertiser-supported. Called March Madness on Demand (MMoD), CBS Sports will again be broadcasting the games as well as the web streaming, starting with Round 1 on March 19. Sure beats that pay-per-view model CBS tried in 2005.

NCAA, via Zatz Not Funny