PGA TOUR Entertainment Preps for 1,000 Hours of Live Players Championship Coverage

PGA TOUR Entertainment Preps for 1,000 Hours of Live Players Championship Coverage Every shot by 154 players will be covered by 120 cameras on the course By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - 3:59 pm

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If you're looking for a history-making moment in sports production, look no further than this weekend's The Players Championship from TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL. It's shaping up to be the largest golf production ever for a single weekend event.

This will be the most coverage of any golf tournament ever, and, with 154 players, we will have 52 groups, says Mike Raimondo, senior director, media asset management and broadcast innovation, PGA TOUR, noting that 120 cameras will be on the course to cover the groups. We scrambled a little bit to make sure that we had everything covered and all the technical resources, but we didn't cut back on any of that kind of stuff. We just had to tweak our hardware a little bit to make that work.

PGA TOUR Entertainment's Every Shot Live will be produced in the compound at TPC Sawgrass but most of the production will be done in the UK.

PGA TOUR Entertainment will show every shot live (approximately 750 hours). Layer in 240 hours of additional content, and NBC Sports and Golf Channel will have wall-to-wall coverage, a cornucopia of more than 1,000 hours of live coverage.

From a live perspective, we are back to normal as far as staffing, and we didn't cut any corners, says Greg Hopfe, VP/executive producer, PGA TOUR Entertainment. We have spread people out more to make sure people are safe.

From a content perspective, says Dave Dukes, senior director, technical operations, PGA TOUR Entertainment, the viewer will have plenty to choose from. It's full on, and we will obviously be able to do it for more than the one day we had last year.

The production of Every Shot Live begins in NEP Supershooter CBS B, C, and D units in the compound, but it extends thousands of miles away. As was done last year, each group will be produced by a team of Hawk-Eye operators located at Hawk-Eye headquarters in Basingstoke, UK.

According to Dukes, the Hawk-Eye interface allows the operator to simply hit a button to switch all the camera feeds from one hole to the next. Every hole has a minimum of three static cameras available to the production teams, in addition to the camera feeds that NBC and Golf Channel use for coverage. As was done last year, those offsite professionals will be looking at proxies of the high-resolution material that never leaves the TPC Sawgrass compound.

The front-bench area in the compound where Every Shot Live will be produced.

Shotlink data was also incorporated with each feed, along with hole flyovers and trace.

On course, the live-camera and audio guys work the same as last year, but the entire production is done offsite, says Raimondo. The only people onsite will be the technical people who make sure the equipment is up, running, and connected properly.

One step taken this year to lessen the number of people onsite is that all nine Trackman operators who were onsite last year will operate out of Trackman headquarters in Phoenix. Both the Hawk-Eye and Trackman teams will be tied into the compound via circuits from The Switch, which will be tied into the D unit (three video shaders will also be in the D unit).

On the transmission side, every single piece of Every Shot Live goes straight into AWS, says Raimondo. There are 52 streams into AWS Media Connect, and, from there, it gets distributed domestically and internationally.

Last year, he continues, we just did 24 streams for 24 groups in the morning, and then the same streams would be used for the afternoon groups. But there were too many close calls from an overlap standpoint, and, in 2019, 11 groups overlapped. We kind of lucked out last year and didn't want to take the chance this year. Now we have a dedicated stream per group.

Domestically, those streams will be available via NBC Sports Gold. Seven international-rights partners are taking either a handful or all of the streams.

Another improvement over last year is that bandwidth has been reduced because all the streams go to AWS rather than multiple locations.

Adds Dukes, On the international side, using AWS allows us a lot of flexibility to service our international partners in various ways. Some won't take all 52 streams, and the nice thing about having all of it in Media Connect is that we can streamline the process of delivering individual streams to partners.

According to Raimondo, partners that use AWS Media Connect can simply be given access by PGA TOUR Entertainment and can take what they need.

If they want something in a specific format, he explains, we can spin it off and get them what they need. And then there are others who don't have Media Connect, and we basically are their CDN spun up in an AWS cloud. They put the URLs on their website or app, and the flexibility seems to be endless. No matter what our partners asked for, we can accommodate it.

The Foundation The efforts this week enable PGA TOUR Entertainment to continue to add more value to the rights by making it easier for international-rights holders to give golf fans in their country the content they want most.

They ask for specific players or groups, says Raimondo, and we are going to start seeing more localizing of content.

AWS is also able to bring more efficiency to non-live workflows for highlights and speed rounds. We send the streams through our AI engine, Raimondo explains, and WSC Sports automatically creates all of the highlights for us as it clips every shot and distributes them to our platform. That allows us to create a speed round for each golfer as soon as their round is over. By th

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