LIV Golf Heads Into Season 2 With More Drone Coverage, Enhanced Virtual Graphics, a Spot on The CW

LIV Golf Heads Into Season 2 With More Drone Coverage, Enhanced Virtual Graphics, a Spot on The CW A live telestrator, unusual for golf coverage, is also in the plan By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor

Friday, February 24, 2023 - 2:12 pm

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As LIV Golf tees up its first year on linear TV following a deal with The CW, the league will continue to push the boundaries of traditional golf coverage with an abundance of innovative production technologies. In addition to boosting its use of live drones and fine-tuning its F1-inspired pylon leaderboard graphic, LIV plans to deploy unique angles and analytics-driven virtual graphics to illustrate how players attack the course.

LIV Golf has fine-tuned its F1-inspired pylon leaderboard graphic.

From a graphics and production-features standpoint, we are building off the innovations that we put in place in 2022, says LIV Golf Chief Media Officer Will Staeger. We went back to the laboratory for the past three months, and we will have some additional features at season's launch, and we'll continue to grow that feature set over the course of the 2023 season.

Under the deal with The CW, LIV retains full production control of broadcasts. Its Season two production blueprint brings back many key elements from what Staeger calls LIV's beta year, including live drones and a CableCam wired aerial system, while enhancing the broadcast with a live telestrator for analysts, splash-zone graphics, putting graphics on the green, enhanced on-course audio, and more.

LIV Golf productions will feature more than 50 cameras at each tournament. (Photo: Hailey Garrett/LIV Golf)

Director Steve Beim and producer Keith Hirshland are again in the truck calling the shots this season; SVP, Worldwide Production, James Watson and Creative Director Will Newell also return. Veteran Fox Sports executive Clark Pierce is back as head of innovation and production partnerships and once again is working closely with NEP, which provides key production facilities for LIV's global schedule of tournaments.

Keeping It Live: The Pylon Leaderboard, Don't Blink' Replay Packages LIV Golf's shotgun start - in which all 48 players are on the course simultaneously, teeing off from different holes - makes the broadcasts unique in the world of golf. Although the format enables a more compact viewing window, it also means that lots of action is taking place at the same time. To keep viewers up to date, LIV last season introduced a leaderboard pylon graphic (driven by Champion Data) that is inspired by Formula 1 broadcasts and intended to provide clarity for viewers, displaying strokes as well as such information as number of holes left to play.

Director Steve Beim (right) and producer Keith Hirshland are back at the front bench for LIV Golf's second season. (Photo: Hailey Garrett/LIV Golf)

Territory Studio serves as the league's graphics partner for on-screen graphics, and Champion Data drives the leaderboard pylon operation.

This season, with more focus on LIV's team-based structure during the broadcast, the pylon leaderboard will permanently display individual and team scores.

[Last season,] it rotated from individual to team, says Staeger, but we're going to have the top five teams displayed permanently along with the individual leaderboard. It will still rotate, but, that way, you can always track where the team standings are, which matters more as the weekend goes on. We don't have to run a second leaderboard [graphic] to show the team standings.

Player-ID technology will be deployed to give insight to player choices.

With all 48 players playing at once, LIV's production team lives by a central mantra: Never pretend you're live.

We don't pretend that we're live like most golf coverage does where shots are taped from two or three minutes ago and played in the broadcast as though they are live, says Staeger. We wanted to steer away from that and be authentic right from the get-go. You're seeing live scoring on the pylon as it happens. Of course, with the shotgun start and all the threesomes playing at once, we're going to miss some shots. That's where our Don't Blink' packages come in.

Don't Blink replay packages run periodically throughout the broadcast and catch viewers up on key shots that aren't shown live. LIV deploys an editing unit onsite to create these replays, and the commentary team explains the action to viewers - also similar to Formula One's coverage.

LIV will also bring back Tagboard to integrate social-media content into broadcasts and will feature it more often within the leaderboard pylon in a more organic way, according to Staeger.

We did a lot with social media with Tagboard last year, he says. It's fun because it lets people be interactive. People are watching live all around the world. They get to weigh in and give their opinion and get seen on camera, but also it fuels some of the conversation from our commentators and helps us be regional and global at the same time. It helps to drive the banter and dialogue in our broadcasts.

Virtual Graphics: Splash Zones, Putting Graphics, a Telestrator LIVE Golf productions typically feature more than 50 cameras strewn throughout the course, including a pair of drones and a CableCam wired system. This year, LIV plans to incorporate AR virtual graphics into drone shots more often to illustrate where players can expect to score better.

We were proud of our drone coverage in 2022, says Staeger. This year, we're going to do a lot more enhanced player tracking and visual effects on top of those drones, including a splash-zone graphic. It's basically a green circle [virtual graphic] from the drone shot: you can see where a player will hit his d

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