During the Indiana-Louisville men’s college basketball game on Saturday, CBS Sports debuted a new feature, CBS Viewpoint.

“We’re about to show you something you’ve never seen before,” play-by-play announcer Tom McCarthy explained on the CBS broadcast. “It’s called CBS Viewpoint. This new technology uses live on-court tracking data to generate virtual recreation of today’s game. It lets us deliver camera angles that were never possible before. Even perspectives that show what players themselves in real time do as they develop.”

That sounds great, in theory. And we’ve seen MLB with Statcast and the NFL with NextGen Stats, for example, use technology to both acquire and demonstrate data that is very useful to organizations, fans, and broadcast viewers. Even the NBA on Prime has shown off some fun, fancy technology to do neat in-studio demonstrations.

Perhaps we’ll see more of that value with CBS Viewpoint in the future, but what the broadcast showed on Saturday came across as just using technology for the sake of technology.

In those examples, simply showing video replay of the actual highlights instead of turning it into an iRobot, College Hoops 2K7 hybrid would’ve worked just fine for viewers.

The initial response to CBS Viewpoint has been pretty universal on X. Here’s a sampling of the feedback:

This is also the sort of feature that would work better on an altcasts, which we’ve seen MLB do for Statcast (with ESPN broadcasts) and the NFL do for NextGenStats (Prime Video’s “Prime Vision” on Thursday Night Football). That allows the audience to decide if they want to see technology, rather than being forced to watch such features on the main broadcast.

So, the debut of CBS Viewpoint wasn’t exactly a hit, and viewers are left wondering who it’s for.