Given how ridiculously hard sinking a hole-in-one is, it should earn you something. For those who’ve accomplished the feat, you probably kept the ball and have a story for the ages. Digital Golf Technologies (DGT) has now come up with a streamlined way to offer golf clubs and their patrons a greater reward for their one-in-a-million accomplishment. The company is offering the first fully automated hole-in-one contest for everyday play.
“We go and install a camera-based system at the course at our cost so we fund the capital and the install,” DGT CEO Mike Jakob said. “What that does is it allows golfers to enter a contest each time they play. Sometimes for an extra fee, sometimes it’s baked into the price of the round.”
Depending on how the club sets it up, each golfer who enters has a shot at cash prizes up to $20,000. Not only that, they will receive HD video of the shot. “It never ceases to surprise me that when somebody actually hits a hole-in-one the first thing they ask for is the video, not the check,” Jakob said with a laugh.
The setup process for a club is simple. DGT will install a series of two-to-three HD point-of-view cameras. They are usually mounted on a pole so as to get a good view of both the green and tee box. From here, a point-to-point wireless system is installed so video can be streamed to the clubhouse.
“Either in the pro shop or in the bar & grill we’ll have live video of the hole which is actually one of the nice features of this tech — you can see what’s going on,” Jakob explained. “The best use of this are the people that are streaming it back to the grill or the bar and some of our partner courses will delay the video about 30 minutes so if you put it on the par 3 17th hole, delay it 30 minutes, we play our round then head to the bar and watch ourselves play that hole.”
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DGT was originally founded by the former CEO of Redbox, Gregg Kaplan. The whole idea was to take that same unattended retail concept and apply it to golf. This way a new revenue stream is created for clubs and they’re able to offer patrons a different way to consume golf, similar to a Top Golf.
In the future, DGT is looking to add different layers to the game such as different payouts or adding “closest-to-the-pin” contests. The company is also in the process of associating brands with the contest to make it more recognizable.
The automated hole-in-one contest offers a different level of excitement to a round of golf. As Jakob put it, “When you’re stepping up to the tee and you’re swinging for $10,000, it gets the heart pumping a little.”