Joost, the online television service, is using this weekend’s March Madness US college basketball games to test a live streaming technology that it hopes will reduce the financial and technical burdens of broadcasting popular events online.

CBS, which has the broadcast rights to the NCAA event and has seen huge traffic to its own web coverage of March Madness in previous years, has joined forces with Joost for the trial. Matt Zelesko, Joost’s head of engineering, said its peer-to-peer technology, which distributes the burden of serving video among users’ own computers, could significantly lower the cost of handling heavy online traffic for live events.