LIV Golf Touts Any Shot, Any Time' Viewing Experience; Adds Live Drone Tracer, New Storytelling Graphics In third year, the tour also seeks to expand its audience with Caffeine partnership By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Thursday, March 7, 2024 - 2:52 pm
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Regardless of where you stand on the polarizing LIV Golf tour, one thing is not up for debate: LIV knows how to innovate. In its third season, LIV continues to deploy a cache of cutting-edge production technologies, including live drones, an F1-inspired pylon leaderboard graphic, analytics-driven virtual graphics, and live mics on players. Also new this season is its Any Shot, Any Time fan-engagement feature.
Returning virtual graphics for this season of LIV Golf include driving zones (shown here), landing zones, score distribution, and the hole strategy graphic.
Philosophically, we have wanted to focus on live innovations, graphics, and storytelling devices, says James Watson, SVP, worldwide production, LIV. We want to make sure we are keeping the viewer focused on the next moment rather than the last one. As we enter Season 3 - our second full season - this philosophy is starting to pay dividends as we roll out innovations we have been planning for two years. Season 3 is going to be about refinement and engagement with the fans on platforms where they want to consume their golf.
Although the primary linear broadcast remains a major focus, the upstart tour believes that viewing innovations, such as the Any Shot, Any Time on LIV Golf Plus, and partnerships with streaming platforms like Caffeine will bring in new fans and keep them engaged longer.
Never Miss a Moment: Viewers Get To Pick Whom To Watch and When LIV's flagship innovation for the start of the 2024 season is Any Shot, Any Time, the tour's choose your own adventure feature that results in 18 alternative feeds (18 threesomes) of live competition coverage streamed on the LIV Golf App.
Any Shot, Any Time allows fans to select exactly which golfers, teams, or groups they want to watch at any given time.
Built on Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, Any Shot, Any Time allows fans to select exactly which golfers, teams, or groups they want to watch at any given time and offers searchable and customizable on-demand highlight reels from any round of any LIV tournament.
We see our Any Shot, Any Time initiative as helping solve the age-old debate between fans, says Watson. Some want to watch the leaders/top 10 players/top 3 teams while others want to watch established stars or their nation's heroes.
To pull this off, the onsite production team delivers 36 synchronized feeds into Google Cloud Platform. AI-informed automated graphics are then added to the feeds to give the user the option of choosing any group on the course as a second-screen experience.
Any Shot, Any Time was developed in partnership with primary technology partner Google Cloud, as well as with Mobii (managing the feeds), Champion Data (graphics), and ViewLift (streaming).
LIV aims to have this technology fully deployed on the LIV Golf App by midseason, along with such features as team-based four-box viewing and scorecard-based any shot callback options for any player in any round.
We feel, says Watson, that this is giving users a piece of tech that they have been crying out for.
Separately, LIV's technology team is also working on a Golf Companion App for events. Powered by Google Cloud's AI technologies, including its latest large language models (LLMs), it will enable fans to access 3D aerial overviews of each venue, advanced real-time statistics, virtual caddie views, and customized competition recaps. Scheduled for a launch this summer, the Golf Companion App will be available for free for consumers and downloaded from Apple and Google Play stores.
Live Drone Tracer, New Storytelling Graphics Added to Arsenal of Tech Toys In addition to innovating on the viewing experience, LIV continues to push the technological envelope with its on-course coverage.
The Virtual Caddie is among the new storytelling graphics featured on LIV Golf broadcasts.
Advances in on-screen graphics include what Watson calls the first-ever live drone tracer and the addition of new storytelling graphics: virtual caddie, player ratings based on strokes-gained data, and predictors of team and individual wins.
Among returning production innovations are caddie mics, landing zones, driving zones, score distribution, and the hole strategy graphic.
Our innovations have been specifically designed to give the viewer as much information and insight as possible before the shot, says Watson. We are constantly refining our production workflows to allow more of these innovations in the show without taking away from the amount of golf shots we show in the coverage.
Behind the scenes, audio is once again playing a major role in telling the story of LIV Golf. For example, at LIV's Las Vegas event during Super Bowl LVIII Weekend, LIV's production team miked Bryson DeChambeau for all three of his rounds, taking fans behind the scenes in a compelling set of features on LIV Golf and the LIV Golf YouTube channel.
From the outset, says Watson, we wanted to set new standards in golf production that leveraged both technology and access to deliver a broadcast that has never been seen before. This was always going to be a long-term strategy, and, over the past two seasons, we have seen incremental additions week to week.
As we get under way [this] season, he continues, we feel that a lot of the ideas we had in 2022 are starting to come to fruition. Strategically, we wanted to make golf more accessible to the audience, and we've done this in a number of ways. Player-access content brings the viewer closer to the pl
