How Streaming Has Transformed NBA Audience Insights
As the NBA has seen its audience shift from traditional TV to streaming, strategies and techniques for measuring that audience and interpreting viewer behavior have shifted with it, with greater fragmentation and different metrics. NBA VP of Global Media Insights Michelle Auguste discusses the challenges and incongruities of audience measurement across different platforms and partners and why old, linear-based models like Nielsen must continue to adapt and evolve in this clip from her keynote fireside chat with Streaming Media’s Steve Nathans-Kelly at Streaming Media Connect 2026.
Fragmented Audience Metrics
Nathans-Kelly asks Auguste how the current streaming era has changed audience insights analysis for sports leagues.
Auguste says it has changed it dramatically, which is exciting because “every six months there’s some kind of enhancement or change to the measurement.” Streaming “has fragmented the viewership and the landscape. And so you’re seeing how people are changing how they consume your product,” she notes. The NBA is noticing that “slightly more than a quarter of our viewership is coming from virtual MVPD [multichannel video programming distributors] homes, and this is the highest share that we have ever seen.”
Fans are no longer prioritizing appointment viewing on linear TV, and they’re watching in different ways: on phones, tablets, and game consoles. “They’re engaging with multiple platforms. And as a result, we’re no longer measuring a single broadcast. Instead, we’re measuring a fragmented, cross-platform behavior. So because the behavior is fragmented, this also leads to having fragmented audience metrics,” Auguste explains.
Inconsistency Across Platforms
The NBA needed to “take a different view” of audience metrics. In addition to looking at the traditional average-minute audience, Auguste says they now have to look at reach across all of the NBA’s platforms, incremental audiences by distribution partners, device-level consumption, and other engagement beyond the live game. It’s important to try to understand “how the behaviors are similar or different by platform.” She cites the example of double-headers. “They display one set of viewership behaviors on linear and another set of behavioral viewership patterns on streaming platforms. So just really understanding the complexities and the differences and the similarities between metrics between the different platforms” is what the NBA has to do, she says.
Auguste had to become aware of the challenge that “the measurement is not consistent across the different platforms and it’s constantly evolving. And Nielsen has been the industry standard since the 1950s, but they really built the model solely on linear television. And they have made a lot of great strides within the last couple of years of incorporating first-party data, from Amazon Prime Video and Netflix into their data, but it’s not really comprehensive.” Auguste says the question the NBA must answer is, “How do we combine and compile all the data from the different platforms to get this comprehensive view to tell us the full story?”
She qualifies that this is only for domestic data. “I don’t even want to talk about international,” Auguste says, “because it’s even more complicated than what we deal with on the domestic side.”
Join us May 12–14, 2026 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect 2026! Registration is open!
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