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Major professional team sports have every play in every game archived, going back decades.
Doing it on the PGA Tour is a bit more problematic.
While football, baseball, basketball and hockey are contested in fixed venues, with between 10 and 22 players on a field at the same time, golf is 18 holes, over hundreds of acres, with 70 or more players competing at the same time in morning and afternoon waves.
Last year, the Philadelphia Eagles led the NFL with an average of nearly 69 plays per game. The Milwaukee Bucks led the NBA with an average of 108 possessions per game. The Boston Red Sox led Major League Baseball with almost 36 at-bats per game.
In the 2019 Players Championship, 144 players competed in 437 rounds and hit 31,251 shots.
Attempting to televise, let alone archive, every shot in a PGA Tour event seems improbable.
Not anymore.
Every Shot Live will begin at this year’s Players Championship at the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. The service will be available to PGA Tour Live subscribers on NBC Sports Gold, a digital streaming platform.
Starting with the first two groups going on the first and 10th tees in the first round on March 12, fans will be able to pick a group and watch every shot for 18 holes. If the Golf Channel or NBC broadcast missed the first few or the last few holes for Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy, Every Shot Live will fill in the gap.
Or, if a fan can’t make it to the Stadium Course to watch a relative or college buddy who happens to be a PGA Tour rookie in the Players, he can kick back with his portable device and watch all 18 holes.
The Players is the only Tour event that will have the feature this season. But that won’t be the case in the future.
“Our vision is to bring every shot in every PGA Tour golf tournament, live and on-demand to our fans,” said Tour chief media officer Rick Anderson. “This is the first step to making that happen.”
PGA Tour Entertainment and the NBC Sports Group will use existing camera positions in place for the network broadcast, plus the previous live streaming of action at hole Nos. 12 and 17, and two morning feature groups.
But additional cameras and operators had to be added to get every group. There will be a total of 120 cameras, with 93 used for Every Shot Live.
Hawkeye Innovations, a Sony company, is providing the production platform for each individual group stream all four days. The cloud-based platform will use 35 producers in Atlanta and London, which will remote into servers in Ponte Vedra Beach.
The streams will go directly to NBC Sports Gold and to Amazon Web Services Media Connect in the cloud for delivery to international partners.
Scott Gutterman, the vice president for digital operations for the PGA Tour, said the project has been in the works for several years.
“People would ask us, ‘How can I watch my favorite player hit every shot?’” he said. “It didn’t even have to be a top-10 player. Family members and friends would like to watch a Tour player for every shot on all 18 holes. We looked at it, did some testing and realized that we could get this done, if everyone wanted to try it.”
The Tour tested aspects of the project at the RSM Classic at Sea Island. And for years, every shot hit at the 17th hole of the Stadium Course had been streamed.
No. 12 was added three years ago, when it was made a driveable par 4. PGA Tour Live also began streaming two feature groups playing early rounds.
Gutterman said players shouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, other than a camera operator with every group.
There won’t be announcers with every group, except for the two feature groups and action at Nos. 12 and 17. However, there will be microphones on every tee box and green, and every wireless camera will have a microphone. Production assistants will keep track of the progress of the group and put graphics on the screen to reflect streaks or trends for those players during the round.
Every tee shot will be tracked through the Toptracer technology.
Players executive director Jared Rice said it’s one more example of innovation at the PGA Tour’s gold standard event.
“The Players always has been a leader in technology,” he said. “We were the first to have electronic scoreboards and LED scoreboards. To deliver every shot by every player live really speaks to that vision of the tournament. It will be great for fans. It gives them the chance to be where they want to be on the course, but with the mobile device they can keep track of their favorite players.”
It’s estimated that there will be a total of 432 hours or coverage Thursday and Friday (based on 144 players in the field) and 315 hours Saturday and Sunday (based on 70 players).
All the shots will be archived, but Gutterman said the only “cut-down” rounds that can be reviewed on demand are the players in the two feature groups.
He anticipates that changing, and when the service expands, fans can use an on-demand function to watch as much or as little of a round as they want.
The possibilities with this type of service are numerous. By tracking views, the Tour can know if a young player is becoming more popular and push highlight shots on social media or pgatour.com.
The Tour can also use Every Shot Live on an international basis.
“It will help us make decisions on how we deliver streams to different markets,” Gutterman said. “We can deliver Viktor Hovland to Norway, Hideki Matsuyama to Japan, Sergio Garcia to Spain.”
The archives also will create a vast treasure trove of shots when PGA Tour Entertainment or other broadcast partners create documentaries and other content.
And in the future, players may be able to access every shot they hit in every tournament for their own instructional purposes.
“Imagine the value of this for a player and his coach,” Gutterman said. “They can go back after a round and watch every shot in minutes. Or they can do it years later.”
In the future, Every Shot Live also can settle historical debates. For example, no one really knows who made the first hole-in-one at the Players Championship. The best determination is that in 1986, Jim Gallagher aced No. 3, and Brad Fable did the same at No. 17 at roughly the same time, based on their early morning tee times in the first round.
With Every Shot Live, there will be no more mysteries.
“We miss so many shots because we don’t have cameras out there every week,” Gutterman said. “Soon, we can start documenting every shot for every player for his entire career. We don’t have every single shot that Tiger has hit. But we might for the next Tiger.”
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