The blueblood with 17 Final Four appearances and five national championships in school history will enter as the underdog in the Sweet 16 tonight, as fourth-seeded Duke heads into the state of Texas to take on No. 1 Houston.
The game is scheduled to start soon, at 9:39 p.m. ET, but more accurately, it will be about 30 minutes after the Marquette vs NC State game ends. It will be televised on CBS, but if you want to watch a live stream, don’t worry. There are a bevy of ways you can watch March Madness online for free.
If you want to watch Houston vs Duke without paying anything at all, you’ll need a streaming service that includes a live stream of CBS and offers a free trial.
YouTube TV (“Base Plan”), DirecTV Stream (“Entertainment” plan or above) and Fubo (“Pro” plan) all fit that description. You’ll want to go with YouTube TV or DirecTV Stream if you want to watch all of the other tournament games, as they both also include TBS, TNT and truTV, while Fubo does not. But if you simply want to watch this game–and any other CBS game this weekend–for free, any of these options will work perfectly fine.
Of course, even if you happen to have already used up all three of those free trials, you’re still not out of options.
While Paramount+ is mostly about its library of on-demand TV shows and movies, it also includes a live stream of your local CBS channel. You’ll need to get the “with SHOWTIME” option, which is the more expensive of its two offerings, but you can watch for free for a week.
Similarly, Paramount+ is also offered through Amazon Prime Channels. You need a Prime subscription for this option, but you can start a 30-day free trial of Prime and a seven-day trial of the Paramount+ Channel at the same time.
If all five of those options don’t work, you can also try out the NCAA’s official March Madness Live app/website, which streams every game of the tournament. It doesn’t cost anything, but it does require you to sign in with a cable provider to watch. However, if you haven’t watched on this platform before, you get a three-hour free preview before you have to sign in.
You have one of those streaming services (which are US-only) but want to watch from abroad? Simple: Get a virtual private network (VPN). These services mask your IP address and location, allowing you to circumvent geo-locks and stream content as if you were actually in the United States (or whatever country of your choosing).
NordVPN is our recommendation, as it tops our list of the best VPN services. It doesn’t come with a free trial, but you can get your money back within 30 days of signing up for any reason, allowing you to test it without any risk.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.