LIV Golf Touts ‘Any Shot, Any Time’ Viewing Experience; Adds Live Drone Tracer, New Storytelling Graphics

In third year, the tour also seeks to expand its audience with Caffeine partnership

Regardless of where you stand on the polarizing LIV Golf tour, one thing is not up for debate: LIV knows how to innovate. In its third season, LIV continues to deploy a cache of cutting-edge production technologies, including live drones, an F1-inspired “pylon” leaderboard graphic, analytics-driven virtual graphics, and live mics on players. Also new this season is its Any Shot, Any Time fan-engagement feature.

Returning virtual graphics for this season of LIV Golf include driving zones (shown here), landing zones, score distribution, and the “hole strategy” graphic.

“Philosophically, we have wanted to focus on live innovations, graphics, and storytelling devices,” says James Watson, SVP, worldwide production, LIV. “We want to make sure we are keeping the viewer focused on the next moment rather than the last one. As we enter Season 3 — our second full season — this philosophy is starting to pay dividends as we roll out innovations we have been planning for two years. Season 3 is going to be about refinement and engagement with the fans on platforms where they want to consume their golf.”

Although the primary linear broadcast remains a major focus, the upstart tour believes that viewing innovations, such as the “Any Shot, Any Time” on LIV Golf Plus, and partnerships with streaming platforms like Caffeine will bring in new fans and keep them engaged longer.

Never Miss a Moment: Viewers Get To Pick Whom To Watch and When

LIV’s flagship innovation for the start of the 2024 season is Any Shot, Any Time, the tour’s “choose your own adventure” feature that results in 18 alternative feeds (18 threesomes) of live competition coverage streamed on the LIV Golf+ App.

Any Shot, Any Time allows fans to select exactly which golfers, teams, or groups they want to watch at any given time.

Built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, Any Shot, Any Time allows fans to select exactly which golfers, teams, or groups they want to watch at any given time and offers searchable and customizable on-demand highlight reels from any round of any LIV tournament.

“We see our Any Shot, Any Time initiative as helping solve the age-old debate between fans,” says Watson. “Some want to watch the leaders/top 10 players/top 3 teams while others want to watch established stars or their nation’s heroes.”

To pull this off, the onsite production team delivers 36 synchronized feeds into Google Cloud Platform. AI-informed automated graphics are then added to the feeds to give the user the option of choosing any group on the course as a second-screen experience.

Any Shot, Any Time was developed in partnership with primary technology partner Google Cloud, as well as with Mobii (managing the feeds), Champion Data (graphics), and ViewLift (streaming).

LIV aims to have this technology fully deployed on the LIV Golf+ App by midseason, along with such features as team-based four-box viewing and scorecard-based “any shot” callback options for any player in any round.

“We feel,” says Watson, “that this is giving users a piece of tech that they have been crying out for.”

Separately, LIV’s technology team is also working on a Golf Companion App for events. Powered by Google Cloud’s AI technologies, including its latest large language models (LLMs), it will enable fans to access 3D aerial overviews of each venue, advanced real-time statistics, virtual caddie views, and customized competition recaps. Scheduled for a launch this summer, the Golf Companion App will be available for free for consumers and downloaded from Apple and Google Play stores.

Live Drone Tracer, New Storytelling Graphics Added to Arsenal of Tech Toys

In addition to innovating on the viewing experience, LIV continues to push the technological envelope with its on-course coverage.

The Virtual Caddie is among the new storytelling graphics featured on LIV Golf broadcasts.

Advances in on-screen graphics include what Watson calls the first-ever live drone tracer and the addition of new storytelling graphics: virtual caddie, player ratings based on strokes-gained data, and predictors of team and individual wins.

Among returning production innovations are caddie mics, landing zones, driving zones, score distribution, and the “hole strategy” graphic.

“Our innovations have been specifically designed to give the viewer as much information and insight as possible before the shot,” says Watson. “We are constantly refining our production workflows to allow more of these innovations in the show without taking away from the amount of golf shots we show in the coverage.”

Behind the scenes, audio is once again playing a major role in telling the story of LIV Golf. For example, at LIV’s Las Vegas event during Super Bowl LVIII Weekend, LIV’s production team miked Bryson DeChambeau for all three of his rounds, taking fans behind the scenes in a compelling set of features on LIV Golf+ and the LIV Golf YouTube channel.

“From the outset,” says Watson, “we wanted to set new standards in golf production that leveraged both technology and access to deliver a broadcast that has never been seen before. This was always going to be a long-term strategy, and, over the past two seasons, we have seen incremental additions week to week.”

“As we get under way [this] season,” he continues, “we feel that a lot of the ideas we had in 2022 are starting to come to fruition. Strategically, we wanted to make golf more accessible to the audience, and we’ve done this in a number of ways. Player-access content brings the viewer closer to the players and teams, helping fans get invested in the story; technology and innovation give fans information and context that help make each shot matter.”

Caffeine and The CW: Reaching Fans Where They Are

LIV is willing to look outside the box when it comes to distribution as well. Intended to reach fans — especially younger demos — in new ways, a recently announced partnership with streaming platform Caffeine adds a new option for viewing LIV Golf’s Friday live coverage.

LIV Golf continues to tweak the F1-inspired leaderboard pylon and tracer graphics in Season 3.

“Bringing in Caffeine and the over 60 million active users who are deeply engaged on the platform has brought LIV a new level of engagement with golf and mainstream-sports viewers,” says LIV Golf Chief Media Officer Will Staeger.

The offerings on Caffeine include LIV’s non-live archive as well as live Friday coverage in the U.S., and more than 14 million views of this content have already been logged — 3 million views on the live and on-demand Friday coverage alone.

“The key here is that Caffeine users are over 90% on mobile and over 75% under the age of 35,” Staeger notes. “The partnership allows us to bring LIV coverage and content to younger viewers than is traditionally the case with golf, with availability on the devices on which they prefer to consume their content.”

As for linear-TV viewership, he says, the tour has seen double-digit or triple-digit audience growth for its first three events on CW’s linear and digital coverage in the U.S. In addition, LIV’s two most-watched rounds were at this season’s first two events: the final rounds in Mayakoba, Mexico, and Las Vegas, respectively.

“Viewers are finding their way to our coverage,” says Staeger. “And CW’s expanding portfolio of sports content allows a crossover with college-sports fans — and soon, NASCAR — helping grow our viewership as a new league.”

In addition to live golf coverage, LIV is providing new studio shows and shoulder programming across its digital platforms. Club 54 LIV Golf Pre-Round and Post-Round Shows are now available on the LIV Golf YouTube Channel and LIV Golf+ streaming app globally, in every territory, and are also aired by most of the tour’s international media partners. LIV has also launched its first podcast, Fairway to Heaven, with broadcasters Su-Ann Heng and Jerry Foltz as co-hosts and featuring a LIV player as guest every week.

“We’re seeing a lot of growth in viewership of this series,” says Staeger. “We’ve also launched LIV Lessons, a multi-part instructional series akin to Masterclass, with LIV players providing tips and techniques in the areas they’re most specialized in.”

You’ve Come a Long Way, LIV: Looking Back on Two Years of Innovation

With the fourth event of the 2024 season teeing off in Hong Kong on Friday, Staeger and Watson took a moment to reflect on what has been quite a journey over the past two years. When LIV Golf launched in spring 2022, they had less than 80 days to assemble the team, technology, and facilities contractors and create an overall broadcast-operations plan.

Since launching in 2022, LIV Golf has put storytelling graphics front and center in its broadcasts.

“We theorized and outlined our ideal vision of revolutionized live golf-competition coverage and then assembled the foundational elements of this coverage in 2022,” says Staeger. “In the 2023 first full LIV Golf League season, we were able to bring 40%-50% of our envisioned tech features, announce-team balance, look and feel, mechanics of the leaderboard pylon, all-access player packages, caddie mics, graphics that inform the viewer on the stakes of each shot they’re seeing, and so forth.”

After an additional offseason in what Staeger refers to as the “R&D Lab,” LIV Golf will continue with additions and refinements to its broadcasts this season: from an enhanced leaderboard pylon to audio improvements for on-course analysts to increased effectiveness on tracer tools, including team-color tracers.

“We’re happy with the way our original vision has come to life,” says Staeger. “The refreshed announce booth with standing positions for our talent, the integration of many on-screen graphics working around the leaderboard, the addition of pre- and post-round shows and original series telling the stories behind the competition — it has all begun to add up to a superior product that brings the fan inside the house and further eliminates the gap between fan and star player.”