Switch Turns On At Brand New PGA Tour Studios

The first round of a fresh PGA Tour season tees off tomorrow in Maui at Kapalua. While the world’s top golfers shake off any offseason rust with their opening drives, PGA Tour Live feed flippers tuning in will get their first taste of the Tour’s new content hub in action.

When the PGA Tour entered into its current domestic media rights deal that runs through 2030, it cemented agreements with existing partners and established a new deal with Disney, making ESPN+ the exclusive home of their subscription video service. As the tour supersized the volume of live production and original programming, the need for new digs became critical. The previous studio, nearly five times smaller than the new facility, housed just a single studio.

“When we did our deal in 2020 for ESPN+ for the four PGA Tour live feeds—featured hole, marquee group, featured group (actually two groups) and the main feed which takes shots from the other feeds and creates a pseudo broadcast for streaming—just doing that deal, right out of the gate, we had already outgrown that old building,” Luis Goicouria, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of media, said. “That old building had one control room and that only enabled us to produce one feed. So, we had to build a compound with TV trucks in the parking lot of our St. Augustine facility. That’s how we’ve been producing our ESPN+ feeds for the last three years.”

The new three-level PGA Tour Studios building was designed by Foster + Partners in collaboration with HLW International and built on land the tour already owned at its Ponte Vedra, Florida campus. The facility contains seven studios with the flexibility of growing to twelve, eight control rooms with the capability of growing to thirteen and will be able to handle all the ESPN+ feeds, over 5,000 hours a footage year. The building serves as the home base of all PGA Tour media operations including the live production of PGA Tour Champions and Korn Ferry Tour and as the repository of the world’s largest golf content library, 223,000 hours-worth, dating back to 1920 when footage was captured on old-timey film reels.

“PGA Tour Studios is a landmark step in golf media, signaling a tangible investment to more deeply connect with our fans through energetic, compelling content that brings them further inside the ropes and closer to their favorite stars,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said.

“Every new technology and forward-thinking innovation we introduce is about serving our fans and meeting them where they are, and the creative capabilities of PGA Tour Studios will help us further that mission while showcasing the beauty of our sport.”

Fan Expectations Have Evolved

The PGA Tour’s expansion into a more dynamic media operation highlights an evolving understanding of fan expectations across a growing number of verticals.

“The whole thing is to reach fans where and how they like to consume content,” Goicouria explained. Every piece of content created needs to be tailored to the medium it appears on. Take a short package on a player for example.

“If we were to spend time with a player and do a feature on him, what you see on Instagram will be different from what you see on X, and that will be different from what you might see on TikTok or on YouTube,” Michael Riceman, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of content and production, said. This strategy enables the Tour to connect with diverse audiences by customizing content to fit each platform’s unique format and user behavior.

As Riceman noted, at first there will be a “crawl, walk, run” mindset, as the organization gradually leverages its new state-of-the-art facilities to their fullest potential, but PGA Tour Live viewers will experience an impactful upgrade straightaway.

Studio 1A, the big kahuna of the new spaces in the production facility, serves as the dedicated home of the main feed. At two stories high, the flagship studio is decked out with wall-to-wall LED boards, robotic cameras and an LED floor. This set-up has Star Trek holodeck potential thanks to a graphic system that can make it look like studio commentators are fully immersed in any location.

“This is the same tech used to shoot The Mandalorian. It’s really, really cool,” Riceman said emphasizing the wow-factor and production value upgrade the new studio tees up.

The new content super hub is intended not only to enhance the viewer experience but also increase the tour’s revenue stream. Sponsors looking to invest will have many more opportunities to integrate their brand messaging as the content hose gushes with more content.

One example, debuting in March timed to coincide with the Players Championship, is the launch of a new world feed. Instead of merely tweaking the domestic package for international consumption, as has been done in the past, this live broadcast will feature its own on-site talent and crew bolstered by additional cameras focused on international players as they make their way around the golf course.

Initially, fans tuning in from Busan or Bucharest will see identical coverage, but in the coming years the gameplan is to introduce localized feeds with native language announcers and graphic packages for their biggest markets, “something for UK, something for Japan, something for Korea and a couple others, Canada maybe,” Goicouria forecasted.

“We are building toward a future where every country, or at least every major country—where it makes economic sense—will be getting their own individualized and customized feed.”

Goicouria firmly believes that in the future every single shot hit on a golf course at every tournament will be captured.

“It’s expensive and it’s hard to do it every single week. Right now, we do it at the Players Championship. Every year we figure out better and more efficient ways to do it and to make the experience for the user better. Ideally, over time, the cost of doing every single shot live will come down and we are actively exploring ways to do that,” he added.

The facility also includes a custom-built video review center that gives officials access to all camera feeds for live, on-air rulings as well as studio-specific booths for podcasts and a 34-seat screening theater. Pro Shop, the PGA Tour’s premium content partner—essentially the NFL Films of the golf world—is housed here too and PGA Tour Radio is slated to move in next year.