85The 2019 Masters always
will be remembered as the
tournament in which Tiger
Woods ended an 11-year
major-victory drought. History, however,
also was made on a separate front: This
was the first major in which every shot on
every hole was available to fans viewing
on the Masters app and Masters.com.
The irony is that Augusta National
historically has been stingy with coverage
of the Masters. It wasn’t until 2002 that
TV viewers saw full final-round coverage,
and the broadcast window remains small
in comparison to other majors.
In the digital space, however, former
chairman Billy Payne presented a vision of“how technology could present the Masters
in ways people couldn’t imagine,” says Noah
Syken, IBM’s VP, sports and entertainment
partnerships. That has carried over under
current chairman Fred Ridley.
During the 2018 Masters, Syken says,
Augusta National discussed the every-
hole, every-shot concept with its media
partners, leaving them less than a year
to develop bulletproof technology. The
stakes were high. Mike Francis, VP, remote
engineering and planning
at CBS, says the network’s
“must-succeed” attitude
was “even more heightened
when doing something sur-
rounding the Masters.”The fact that fans were able to view
every shot struck by every player is
both a technical triumph and, perhaps, a
template for the future of golf coverage.
Start with the basics. CBS used 110
cameras at the Masters, roughly 25 more
than in 2018. That was necessary to cover
every tee shot, fairway and green during
the three-hour window when there was
play on all 18 holes. With so many more
cameras on course, Francis says many of
the handheld operators in the fairways
were flying solo. “They didn’t have a
director in their ears all the time,” he says.
CBS didn’t have enough space onsite
for the technicians to handle all of that
additional content, so it transmitted it
to offices in Atlanta and the UK. The
footage was “broadcast-quality, but not
necessarily web-friendly,” Francis says, so
CBS’ high-resolution recordings had to be
transmitted to IBM in a format that could
be posted online automatically. CBS went
so far as to develop custom monitoring
to track clips from creation to posting on
the Masters app. “If something were to
fail, it would give us an idea of where the
issue occurred,” Francis says.
IBM’s job was to find creative ways to
present all of those golf shots to viewers
using the app or Masters.com.
During play, fans were able to see shot-
tracking tech and video of each shot. At
day’s end, they could watch every shot
a player struck during a round in the
space of 20 minutes. Still too long? IBM
this year introduced its “Round in Under
Three Minutes” feature. IBM’s Watson AI
scoured the footage for visual and audio
cues—the roar of the crowd, a fist pump
after a birdie—to cherry-pick the most
significant moments from each player’s
round. Watson, being something of a golf
nerd, knew to include all birdies.
Because it was fully automated, all of
this content was available
within five minutes of the
end of each player’s round.
Augusta National is
expected to add new features
to the every-shot, every-hole
coverage in 2020. “The kinds of experi-
ences we can create are almost never-end-
ing,” Syken says. The same could be said of
the ramifications. Francis says the model
created for the Masters, which typically
invites fewer than 100 players each year,
is “very scalable.” It’s easy to imagine a
full-field PGA or U.S. Open in which every
shot is available digitally.
Syken again: “The ability to integrate
that data and apply AI to it and create
other experiences is almost infinite.”At the 2019 Masters, every player in the field (pictured)
had their every swing and stroke viewable by golf fans.Pl
ay
er
sp
ot
ph
ot
os
by
G
et
ty
Images
and^ USAToday^ Sports