: [By Staci D. Kramer] While attention—including ours—was fixated on NBCU’s first foray into online Olympic video and CBS’s success with live streaming March Madness, another online sports operation quietly and steadily kept piling up impressive ad-supported broadband numbers.  In February alone, the National Basketball Association set an in-house record for video traffic on NBA TV Broadband: more than 22 million videos played totalling more than 466,000 viewing hours. In the first four months of the season, the NBA served up more than 75 million videos, up seven-fold over last year when the bulk of broadband content was subscription-only.

For Brenda Spoonemore, SVP-Interactive Services for NBA Entertainment, the internal numbers—most published here for the first time—back up the decision to move from subscription to ad-supported broadband. Advertisers seem to agree—the effort started with three charter advertisers and now has about 30. (More from the lengthy interview here.)

Some other notable stats:

—From the November 1 tip-off this season through the end of February, NBA TV Broadband averaged more than 19 million videos a month totaling 1.5 million plus hours to users in nearly 200 countries. (The NBA isn’t sharing the actual stats for specific videos but highlights from Kobe Bryant’s amazing 81-point game lead the pack followed by highlights from the All-Star slam dunk competition and the All-Star game.)

—The current average is about 650,000 videos per day—if sustained, a pace that would total 140 million-plus videos for the season and more than 2.5 million viewing hours.

—The NBA All-Star weekend alone had more than 5.3 million video views with that Sunday and Monday successively setting daily viewing records. (The All-Star data was released earlier.)

In comparison, although it’s not exactly apples to apples, during the high-profile, heavily promoted 17 days of Olympics in February, NBCOlympics.com served 9.1 million video streams, the equivalent of 125,000-plus hours of video.