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ONCE UPON A TIME, THE PGA TOUR WAS
a small, genteel sports league with just a couple of hours of weekend
programming. Not anymore.
Today, the PGA TOUR is a sporting giant with a multitude of
broadcast partners and its own live-streaming service, PGA TOUR
LIVE, providing hundreds of hours of programming each week from
its six professional golf tours, including the PGA TOUR, PGA TOUR
Champions, and Korn Ferry Tour, along with series in Canada, Latin
America, and China.
And just as the game has grown, so has the TOUR’s media asset
management system (MAM). What was once an antiquated system
of videotapes of the tournaments with handwritten logs of the content
stored in a warehouse is now a high-tech content storage and retrieval
network. Every shot from every camera angle of every tournament—
thousands of shots every week—is now stored in a sophisticated
database. Think of it as a highly searchable in-house YouTube system.
“The PGA TOUR’s Media Asset Management system is consistently
rated by our media partners as one of the best
and most intuitive in the industry for finding and
pulling video from our archive,” says Rick Anderson,
the PGA TOUR’s chief media officer. “The system
currently supports over 15 internal and external
broadcast partners. As of last year, we had more
than 100,000 hours of video ingested and more than
6 million log entries. In 2018 alone, we ingested
more than 8,500 hours of video, representing a 75%
increase from just six years ago.”
Broadcast partners once traveled the country
with semitrailers full of copies of those old video-
tapes that they would have to manually search to pull
up an old clip for use. Now all they have to do is log
in to the MAM’s web-based interface to access the
content—say, Tiger Woods’ first tee shot in a PGA
TOUR event at the 1992 Los Angeles Open—and it’s delivered in
seconds from the 22 servers that store almost six petabytes of data.
But it’s not just CBS, NBC, and Golf Channel accessing this digital
treasure trove. A number of others—from advertising partners who li-
cense the content to players who want to study how a putt broke on a
particular green in a previous tournament they played in—do so, too.
Of course, the database’s value is only going to increase with time.
“A friend and I used to joke that New York City is going to be fantastic
when it’s finished,” says PGA TOUR MAM director Michael Raimondo.
“That’s the same way we feel about MAM. The archive will never be
finished, because we keep adding more and more content all the time
and increasing the capabilities of what the system can do.”
Now that’s major league.■
SPONSORED CONTENT
THE PGA TOUR’S STATE-OF-THE-ART
MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
IS A TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT
UNMATCHED IN SPORT.
What a
Shot!
THE PGA TOUR DIGITIZED DECADES’ WORTH OF VIDEO ASSETS THAT ARE READILY
AVAILABLE FOR A WIDE VARIETY OF USES, INCLUDING PGA TOUR LIVE (PICTURED
ABOVE), THROUGH THE MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (PICTURED BELOW).
