Live From THE PLAYERS: RED Cameras Help Cosm Capture Unique Looks for Cosm Venues The immersive experience shows the whole tourney today, final nine on Sunday By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, March 14, 2025 - 8:00 am
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Immersive-experience provider Cosm is onsite at THE PLAYERS at TPC Sawgrass in a big way. Five cameras capture the action at the 16th, 17th, and 18th holes, forming the backbone of the immersive-video experience at the Cosm venues in Los Angeles and Dallas and giving golf fans their first chance to see golf in the Dome. The first day of coverage was yesterday. PLAYERS is broadcast in the Cosm venues today, with the final nine holes broadcast on Sunday.
The Cosm camera mounted on a post next to the 17th green captures the green in dramatic fashion.
In general, says Alex Magid, director, business development and partnerships, Cosm, 2025 is going to be a lot of testing and understanding what the marketplace is looking for. This being our first golf tournament is very exciting, and we've seen some strong numbers with ticket sales thus far, which is encouraging. But we'll have some learnings and then look toward the future and what other opportunities there are.
Jed Drake (left) and Alex Magid near the 18th green, where Cosm has installed cameras to capture the closing drama this weekend
The production team has worked closely with PGA TOUR Entertainment and NBC Sports to find the right locations and provide additional broadcast feeds that can enrich the Cosm experience. They've been spectacular to work with and totally understand what we're trying to achieve, says Cosm consultant Jed Drake, principal, Drake & Associates. They have helped us in great ways, including allowing us to place cameras in the water next to the 16th and 17th greens. Fans can't stand in the water 15 ft. off those greens, but we can put them there.
Cosm's James Montemurno installs the RED camera for coverage of the famous 17th island green.
Getting the two cameras installed in the water required some hunting along the bottom of the lake to find the best combination of a great angle and a stable foundation. The cameras are controlled remotely from the compound before the signals are sent to the company's Los Angeles control room, where the production team can switch among feeds.
We have 8K RED Raptor cameras that are hardwired with fiber and power to those positions, says Drake. The video is stunning. The team in Los Angeles has been blown away by the images: it's as if you're here. The course is striking and beautiful, but, when you put it in an 87-ft.-diameter dome, it's spectacular.
Getting the 8K feeds from the cameras ready for the 12k Cosm screen takes advantage of the RED camera's fiber back, which allows 10-Gbps transport of the signals to the compound. Once there, the signals are tossed into a network switch for shading (remotely from Los Angeles) and quality control before transport (again, at 10 Gbps) to CCU servers in the compound.
We create CCUs via the network instead of having a traditional CCU on one of the trucks, explains Joe Garcia, director, technical field operations, Cosm.
From there, the signs are sent via fiber to Los Angeles, where a GPU decodes the incoming signals and generates a quad-link 12-Gig signal for display on the 12k dome.
The Cosm team in the TV compound is able to monitor the signal being sent to the Los Angeles control room.
THE PLAYERS experience features coverage from the RED cameras and insets with the NBC broadcast as well as the potential to drop in video of featured holes. NBC commentary will be passed through the PA system, and fans at the Cosm experience will also see the commercials (some of the other broadcasters opt out of showing the commercials and instead run a Cosm logo during breaks).
One factor that differentiates a golf course from other venues where Cosm has had a presence is that crowd size, environment, and crowd-noise level are different at each hole.
To show three distinct geographical locations, Garcia explains, we need to deliver three distinct geographical areas, which is different from a basketball game [where the crowd noise is more uniform]. In Los Angeles, [Lead Broadcast Engineer] Dave Light, [VP, Video Technology] Ryan Cole, and the whole team have been up early, and we're appreciative of that. We have multiple feeds coming into Los Angeles from here, so it will be a challenge for the team there to manage the multiple audio composite signals from the NBC broadcast as well as the Featured Groups and Featured Holes. But that's the fun part.
Magid sees this weekend's effort as indicative of the great relationships Cosm has been able to forge with NBC but also with ESPN, CBS, FOX, Amazon, and TNT: Across the board, I think what we've been able to build over the past couple of years are relationships where we could do tests and build that trust between our production team and their production teams.
From left: Jed Drake, principal, Jed Drake & Associates; Koji Kameda, field engineer, Cosm; James Montemurno, camera tech, Cosm; and Joe Garcia, director, technical field operations, Cosm.
Drake cites an experience when NBC executives on hand for a Sunday Night Football production at SoFi Stadium last fall stopped by the Cosm L.A. venue to check out the Thursday Night Football telecast. It happened to be the snow game in Cleveland. They sat there watching the game, and then it started to snow. They had the greatest time watching this snowstorm in an immersive dome, where you are completely enveloped by it.
The Cosm camera located next to the 16th green
The key, says Magid, is not overselling the experience, which has been one of the issues around immersive experiences in the past. P
