Sports Has a Measurement Problem. Russell Fink Has Been Living It for Two Decades.
The 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics generated 16.7 billion minutes of streamed coverage. NBC led with that number. But what does it actually mean?
Russell Fink has spent twenty years inside regional sports networks — starting at SNY in 2007, watching RSNs rise, then watching streaming dismantle everything that made them work. He knows what good measurement looks like. And he knows what it looks like when an industry confuses volume with value.
His recent piece in State of Streaming — Too Much of a Good Thing? Sports' Measurement Problem — makes the case that sports media hasn't just accumulated too many metrics. It's lost the discipline to decide which ones actually matter.
The argument isn't anti-data. It's anti-confusion. When Netflix leads with their metric, Amazon based on Prime households, and Disney+ on something else entirely, every platform is simultaneously number one. That's hardly measurement and mostly marketing.
The full conversation is on the State of Streaming podcast. Fink goes deeper on the cause of the RSN collapse, why streamers defaulted to linear formats instead of reinventing the viewing experience, and what a smarter measurement framework should look like — by department, by goal, by what drives revenue and advertiser outcomes.
Sales teams need different signals than programming departments. Leadership has to be the translation layer for them. Right now, almost nobody is doing that.
Listen to the episode. Read the piece. There is more data than ever and less certainty about what any of it means.
That's the problem worth solving.
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