I watched the Oscars like everyone else a few weeks ago, and I assumed it was huge television event, up there with the Super Bowl. It turns out – I was half wrong. In round numbers, the most recent Super Bowl drew 90 Million average viewers, while the Oscars captured only 40 Million, something under half.

While sports programming has its own draw, I still thought this once-a-year movie star extravaganza would make a dramatic mark. And yet, the ratings for the following Tuesday’s episode of “American Idol” were only slightly off the Oscar pace. “American Idol” drew 30 million viewers – three-quarters of the Academy Awards – and instead of an annual event, another episode was yet to come the very next night.

For decades now, we’ve only looked at ratings as the measure of a program’s success, but how do you factor in this other piece of American Idol data: Over 30 million votes were cast for one singer or another, and this was done by either calling an 800 number or texting “vote” on a cell phone. The Oscars didn’t ask us to do that, and neither did the Super Bowl, so the question is: Are there new measures for success, now that technology is offering us new options?

March Madness is upon us, and it’s already taken us to a new place – The very first day, 200,000 people decided to watch the basketball games … over the Internet … all at the same time. The numbers would have been higher, but there was only room for 200,000 … 150,000 people were in the digital waiting line, just trying to get in.

No one was prepared for this, and why should they have been? Why wouldn’t these people have simply watched a TV? Was their favorite team not being televised locally? Were they at work, and couldn’t watch? Or was it … actually, who cares? The fact is the Internet was their technology of choice, and there’s no arguing with that.

The folks in charge of March Madness madly scrambled for expanded bandwidth to support anyone who wanted to watch online, just as they also looked for innovative ways to embed advertising and hike the rates of anything that could be monetized.

While a few hundred thousand doesn’t compare with tens of millions, this technology is early yet – what the numbers will eventually be is anybody’s guess.

From a tech point of view, it’s really very simple: The March Madness experience is about a technology on the rise, while the Academy Awards are about a technology in its decline. And there’s no doubt – the Hollywood powers-that-be know this. You could see it in the hard-sell.

Throughout the evening, the messages varied, but they all distilled down to this: There’s nothing like the experience of watching a movie in a movie theater, including the truly-overreaching additional benefit of watching it with a roomful of strangers. One actor-announcer was put up to undercutting the techno-competition, suggesting that watching a movie on a tiny screen with a DVD just didn’t cut it.

And why did no one comment on watching a movie while hooked up to the Internet? Because it’s not quite yet a reality.

But it’s not about the technology – it’s about the economics. To make the really big bucks, Hollywood needs us all to swarm to movie theatres.

But no one can stop the relentless march forward of new technology, just as no one can control what people make their technology of choice.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.