Twitter and PGA Tour reach 31-tournament deal to stream live golf online
The PGA Tour dives headfirst into the digital age with a new streaming deal with Twitter
Give the PGA Tour credit for its entrance into the always-on era where our phones are glued to our hands and the nearest big screen is never more than a few feet away. It jumped into the digital age last year when it experimented with PGA Tour Live, a streaming service that offered live golf coverage on Thursdays and Fridays of a variety of events before the afternoon TV coverage.
Now the PGA Tour has entered into a partnership with Twitter to bring you even more live golf. This experiment started at the very end of 2016 when a couple of events were streamed to Twitter on Thursday and Friday. Now it is a full-blown partnership that includes 31 events and over 70 hours of coverage.
Twitter will begin live streaming at the CareerBuilder Challenge on January 19 and conclude at the season-ending Tour Championship. Coverage typically will include the first 60 to 90 minutes from the early Thursday and Friday morning hours of PGA Tour Live's Over-The-Top (OTT) subscription window, on a global basis. This coverage will include pre-game analysis, interviews, range coverage, and live competition from the first two holes of each day's PGA Tour Live Marquee Groups.
It is clear that this won't replace PGA Tour Live but will be a sort of addendum to it -- a free one at that (PGA Tour Live costs $39.99 per year).
"Twitter and the PGA Tour have been working together on Twitter Amplify for many years now, and the program has been a tremendous success for both companies," said Rick Anderson, chief media officer of the PGA Tour, in a release. "Streaming PGA Tour Live programming to Twitter's global audience, as well as the millions of users who follow @pgatour and hundreds of PGA Tour player accounts, will provide new and innovative ways for sports fans to engage with our premium OTT offering."
"The PGA Tour continues to transform the experience for fans on Twitter, a place where golf conversation is happening live in real time every day," said Anthony Noto, COO at Twitter.
It will be interesting to look back in 10 years on new PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan's accomplishments. He took over for exiting commissioner Tim Finchem this month, and I expect digital growth to be one of the tenants of his tenure as the most powerful man at the PGA Tour.
"The No. 1 takeaway that we all had [from visiting Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies] and something we talked about as we were all coming back is as much video content as we're creating, we probably need to create somewhere in the magnitude of three to five times more as we go forward," Monahan said recently. "We have a significant investment in our digital media across all of our platforms (but) I think you could expect that we're still fairly embryonic in the way we're approaching that in terms of investment level.
"It has to augment and support what we're doing from a television standpoint, and we feel like we're doing a really good job on that front. But what we think of that world today, mobile and digital and now 80 percent of our fans are consuming their content via mobile. That will look very different in a year or two from now. Having the ability to adapt and being flexible about content and rights is something that is and will continue to be very important for us and our media partners."
As long as we get to see more live golf, I'm all for it.
















