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
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
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
Most recent headlines
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Scripps Research study links sleep variability with sleep apnea and hypertension How consumers' digital activity trackers could enable personalized health s...
23/12/2025
How guilas Cibae as Dominican Winter League Games Are Locally Produced for Glob...
23/12/2025
BitFire's Jim Akimchuk on Supplying Scalability and Customization in the Clo...
23/12/2025
CAMB.AI Enables European Athletics to Offer Multi-Language SupportPlan is to eventually offer translation into all languages spoken in EuropeBy Ken Kerschbaumer...
23/12/2025
Analysis: As sports media values trend negative, scarcity and quality are king By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Monday, December 22, 2025 - 14:08
Print ...
23/12/2025
ESPN, Disney, and NBA Return to the Animated Altcast Fray With Second Edition of...
23/12/2025
End the Year on a High Note and Donate to the Sports Broadcasting Fund Today! By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, December 23, 2025 - 12:25 pm
...
23/12/2025
The year is winding down, the weather outside is frightful, and it's the perfect time to escape into a story that warms the heart. For listeners looking for...
23/12/2025
A Zeus motor is hot fire tested at L3Harris' Camden, Arkansas, solid rocket ...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Lightware will exhibit several major product innovations at ISE 2026, including the new USB-C BOOSTER-V1, Google Meet. integration for various Taurus UCX models...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Taking the Stage at Carnegie Hall-On a Global Scale Boston Conservatory Orchestra students reflect on their epic concert marking the 80th session of the UN Gene...
23/12/2025
Experience the power of WO Automation for Radio's newest service, the System Effectiveness Review. Designed to help you achieve more, a System Effectiveness...
23/12/2025
23 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan and Rakuten Symphony Collaborate to A...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
How Steamy Can It Get? Single's Inferno' Season 5 Pre...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
33 Million Global Viewers on Netflix Watched Jake Paul vs. Ant...
23/12/2025
New technique lights up where drugs go in the body, cell by cell Scripps Research scientists developed a technique that maps drug binding in individual cells th...
22/12/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Presidio's Neerav Shah on the Role of Its Captiva...
22/12/2025
Hitting the bullseye: Sky Sports readies itself for the biggest PDC World Darts ...
22/12/2025
Unique skillset: Bringing new directors to the world of darts at The Worlds with...
22/12/2025
Gravity Media prepares for a flight of fancy with the PDC World Darts Championsh...
22/12/2025
One hundred and eighty: Gravity Media on hitting the production bullseye at the ...
22/12/2025
The Famous Group's Jon Slusser on Fascinating Fans Through Immersive Content...
22/12/2025
ESPN's Meg Aronowitz on Continuing High-Quality Broadcasts of Collegiate Spo...
22/12/2025
ESPN Takes Data-Driven Storytelling to New Heights with MNF Playbook with Next ...
22/12/2025
For a decade, popular German podcast Fest & Flauschig has hosted an annual Chris...
22/12/2025
Paramount Scores Largest Share Increase Among Distributors as Paramount and CBS...
22/12/2025
New multi-year deal integrates Roku's data to fuel Nielsen's measurement suite
Roku gains access to Nielsen's streaming ratings, showing The Roku C...
22/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
22/12/2025
Berklee Wrapped 2025: Our Top News and Stories A look back at a year highlighted by faculty milestones, major film and television projects, Bob Dylan's ho...
22/12/2025
The works of Plato state that when humans have an experience, some level of change occurs in their brain, which is powered by memory - specifically long-term me...
22/12/2025
Partnership integrates complementary satellite data and AI analytics to enhance security, infrastructure, and environmental monitoring solutions for global cust...
22/12/2025
Workflows allow you to create a sequence of planned events which may be added to your template(s) or inserted directly into your sequential or background playli...
22/12/2025
Monday 22 December 2025
Sky extends PGA TOUR partnership until 2029, as Sky Spo...
22/12/2025
Back to All News
Global Anime Hits and New Releases Take Center Stage at Jump Festa 2026
Entertainment
22 December 2025
GlobalJapan
Link copied to clipboar...
22/12/2025
Siobh n McSweeney, Rory McIlroy, Elon Musk, Catherine Connolly, Jim Gavin, Ivan Yates and Traitor Paudie Moloney lead new characters for Callan Kicks the Year 2...
22/12/2025
Winner announced in the picturesque surroundings of Wicklow's Avondale Tower and Treetop Walk
Andrew Trimble wins the show in his first series as coach
Th...
22/12/2025
The 2025 winners have been announced today, Sunday 21 December, for Ireland's largest choral competition Choirs for Christmas hosted by RT lyric fm.
Ove...
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 
