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.”
Read the rest of the story
RSS Feed