PGA TOUR Centers Media Operations in Transformative New Studio

Fully integrated ST 2110 facility enhances production for fans domestic and international

The PGA TOUR’s 2025 season gets under way this week with The Sentry tournament Jan. 2-5 in Maui, HI. For the sports-production community, the real action is more than 4,600 miles away at the newly opened PGA TOUR Studios in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL. The 165,000-sq.-ft building will transform not only PGA TOUR operations but the way content is produced and distributed for fans around the world.

Launching a new era.

Welcome to PGA TOUR Studios 🎬🚁 pic.twitter.com/QT7GNuEeih

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) December 30, 2024

“PGA TOUR Studios is a landmark step in golf media, signaling a tangible investment to more deeply connect with our fans through energetic, compelling content that brings them further inside the ropes and closer to their favorite stars,” says PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan. “Every new technology and forward-thinking innovation we introduce is about serving our fans and meeting them where they are. The creative capabilities of PGA TOUR Studios will help us further that mission while showcasing the beauty of our sport.”

The facility is opening with seven studios (each with 270-degree LED displays), eight production-control rooms, eight audio-control rooms, six editing rooms, and two voiceover rooms in full operation mode. It also has plenty of room to grow: it can house up to 12 studios and 13 production-control rooms, and four finish-editing suites are in the plans.

The main studio features an LED floor, and the 270-degree LED wall has segments that can be opened and closed. Six of the other studios are a mixture of hard sets and LED walls.

The main PGA TOUR studio features a 270-degree LED wall and an LED floor. (Photo: Chris Condon/PGA TOUR)

More important, the facility gathers under one roof all PGA TOUR media operations: live production of PGA TOUR Champions; Korn Ferry Tour; more than 5,000 hours of PGA TOUR LIVE on ESPN+; the TOUR’s expansive roster of more than 50 original, social, and digital platforms; and an archive of more than 223,000 hours of golf content.

“Virtually every content creator for the PGA TOUR is in this facility,” says Mike Raimondo, VP, broadcast technology, PGA TOUR. “For example, our Creative Studio group, which was not located at our previous facility in St. Augustine, creates our PGA TOUR LIVE graphics packages and other things. They are now in the same facility, which is great because they have been an integral part of building and designing the studios here. They can interact with the studio team in a way they couldn’t in the past, making sure we have different graphic looks that can go anywhere we want in the studios.”

The bigger facility also required a bigger staff with, for example, the engineering team growing from five to 18. “I like to say that we went from being a mom-and-pop shop to an enterprise,” he adds. “We also grew our operations and realigned so that the production team has a structure in place where all the TDs and graphics or replay operators report up through that one structure.”

The launch this week involves production of a PGA TOUR LIVE stream and an enhanced international feed from The Sentry. NEP production units are onsite at the Kapalua Plantation Course in Maui, and The Switch is transmitting all the camera and audio signals to PGA TOUR Studios in Florida.

“The enhanced international feed eventually will become a world feed, which will launch at the PLAYERS in March,” Raimondo explains. “It will be a true world feed that we produce from end to end — unlike the enhanced international feed, where we take the network backhaul and have our own announcers and graphics and use our own footage during commercial breaks.”

A Long-Term Vision

Located next door to the 187,000-sq.-ft. PGA TOUR headquarters and to TPC Sawgrass, site of the PLAYERS tournament every March, the new facility turns Ponte Vedra into the clear home of the PGA TOUR, completing a vision that began with rights-deal negotiations in 2017 and took shape with the groundbreaking in 2022. Also in ’22, the PGA TOUR assumed responsibility for the technical infrastructure of co-sponsored golf events produced by Golf Channel, NBC, and CBS. The migration of PGA TOUR LIVE to ESPN+, along with the TOUR’s acquiring minority investment in European Tour Productions (European Tour Group’s media-production company), necessitated an across-the-board upgrade of the production infrastructure.

An important first step came in 2024 with the launch of the PGA TOUR fleet, which comprises nine state-of-the-art production trucks and showcases a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the PGA TOUR and its media partners (CBS/Paramount+, NBC/Golf Channel/Peacock, and ESPN+). The fleet serves as the production hub for seven live shows from each tournament: the network broadcast, four PGA TOUR LIVE streams on ESPN+, and two live streams for IMG Arena. The close collaboration between the TOUR and its network partners enhances resource-sharing, including cameras, microphones, ball-tracking technology, wireless infrastructure, and other technology tools.

PGA TOUR Studios began coming online late last year, first with postproduction. The studios and control rooms then came online, offering opportunities for training on the Hawk-Eye replay system, Grass Valley production switchers, and Calrec audio consoles. During November and December, production teams at the facility shadowed onsite production teams, with incoming camera signals enabling talent and operators to get accustomed to the new way of producing international world feeds, PGA TOUR LIVE shows, and more.

The facility is a treasure trove of technology from a variety of vendors: Adobe, Appear, Apple, Arista, AT&T, Belden, Boland, Calrec, Cisco, Cobalt, Comcast Business, Forecast Consoles, Grass Valley, Hawk-Eye, Konica Minolta, Manifold, ROE, Ross Video, RTS, Sennheiser, Sony, Southern Company, Tag VS, and Vitec. CDW provided consulting, and NEP Group played a major role in integration and design of the entire plant.

“It came down to picking the right partners and understanding appropriate vendor management, how to set expectations, and how to make a vendor understand what you’re trying to accomplish,” says John Honeycutt, a consultant on the project, who spent 16 years at Discovery and was at FOX Broadcasting from 1995 to 2003. “You also need to understand the technology gaps and get the vendors to work together as the PGA TOUR is really transforming the way they work. I also think more of these projects will be launched in the next few years as leagues try to expand their opportunity around international rights.”

One of eight control rooms producing a wide range of content at the new PGA TOUR Studios. (Photo: Chris Condon/PGA TOUR)

Some of the technology gaps involved deployment of the SMPTE ST 2110 standard and integration not only within the facility but with previous technology advances, such as the IP-based truck fleet that rolled out last season. Raimondo says that, tied in with the trucks, the new facility opens up an amazing amount of flexibility.

“ST 2110 is not easy, especially as we have a large facility,” he notes. “Even with the expertise that we have, we are still getting some of our engineering team up to speed on what it means and how it works. But we do have NEP’s TFC [Total Facility Control] in this facility, and that is very different from probably a lot of the other facilities. Having TFC creates synergy between the truck at the course and this building and has also done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to configuring the IP signals.”

Getting to this point has taken some troubleshooting, such as solving sync issues in the edit rooms, where the Sony and Boland monitors had slight differences in delay because they are SDI monitors being fed converted ST 2110 signals. “It has just been about working through those little details where, in the SDI world, it would just be plug in the monitor and that was it,” Raimondo adds. “But the flexibility we have is amazing.”

For Honeycutt, the key to the effort is understanding the business goals and finding the best tools to make those goals possible: “The TOUR has made an investment across the trucks but also with things like Shot Link and data acquisition and visualization. It’s impressive, and it has been great watching the PGA TOUR and its production team grow. I’ve worked in big companies my whole career, and people and culture are very important to me; just watching how the business has changed has been a privilege.”

The plant is operating in 1080p SDR mode, but HDR is on the roadmap, and the plant (and production trucks) are ready for HDR operations.

“We’re going to hold off on HDR for now. You don’t just take a one-hour class and understand HDR,” says Raimondo, noting, “There are a lot of different groups, not just the engineering staff, that will need to understand what they need to do when working in HDR.”

The Next Step

When the American Express Tournament is played Jan. 16-19 in La Quinta, CA, the new facility will really be humming. PGA TOUR’s Supershooter Tour production trucks will be onsite and sending upwards of 66 cameras on a weekly basis. It will usher in a new era for the PGA TOUR: the IP-based truck fleet will be married to the IP-based facility, allowing the PGA TOUR to truly meet the needs of international rightsholders.

Aerial view of new 165,000-sq.-ft PGA TOUR Studios facility in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL (Photo: Chris Condon/PGA TOUR via Getty Images)

“If you’re in Australia or in Europe or Japan and you see PGA TOUR golf, it will have our new look, which will be a PGA TOUR–style look,” says Raimondo. “It will also have our own announcers and graphics as well as our own dedicated cameras plus the network and PGA TOUR LIVE cameras.”

This will allow more focus on international players, which will particularly serve foreign rightsholders, who aren’t as focused on U.S. golfers as CBS, NBC, and ESPN are. “The feed will be geared more toward the needs and requests of international rightsholders,” Raimondo notes, “as opposed to just showing the U.S. network feed. Also, there won’t be a CBS or NBC logo bug; every week, it will look like a PGA show.”

The effort has taken long hours and plenty of planning, problem-solving, and troubleshooting, but, for Raimondo and the team, it has been transformative.

“We’re all going toward the same goal,” he says. “For the engineering team, the customer has always been the production team and the operators, making sure they get what they need. There have been long days, but everyone takes pride in what they do and ultimately want everything to be successful when we go on-air.”