With Gary Woodland unexpectedly holding a final-round lead at this year’s U.S. Open, the producers at Fox Sports wanted to show TV viewers a viral moment from January’s W.M. Phoenix Open. At that tournament’s pro-am, Woodland played alongside Amy Bockerstette, a scholarship golfer at Paradise Valley Community College who has Down syndrome. She parred the 16th hole after a brilliant bunker shot brought her within 15 feet of the hole and received a hearty embrace from Woodland.
Fox called the PGA Tour for the footage and reached someone in the licensing department—who was in his car. He logged into the Tour’s Media Asset Management (MAM) System via his phone, searched for the clip and loaded it into Dropbox; the video aired on Fox minutes later.
“Amy … you’re our hero.”
How a superstar named Amy teamed up with @GaryWoodland to win the hearts of the 16th hole crowd @WMPhoenixOpen.#LiveUnderPar pic.twitter.com/iRhZbvdjuP
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) January 30, 2019
In the not-too-distant past, the PGA Tour still lugged a video tape library to each tournament course to meet such arising needs. “This never would have happened before,” says Michael Raimondo, the PGA Tour’s MAM director, describing the system as an “in-house Netflix.”
The Tour began digitizing its archival footage back in 2010, a task that was only completed late last year. That includes DVDs, VHS tapes and even handwritten logs. There are now 6.4 million log entries covering more than 100,000 hours of footage and consuming 5.8 petabytes of data. (One petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes; the Tour’s nearly six-petabyte archive is akin to 40 billion Facebook photos’ worth of data.) The oldest clips date back to the 1928 L.A. Open while the oldest PGA Tour broadcasts date back to the 1972 PGA Championship. The Tour has sent its own cameras into the field since 1986.
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“We’re preserving the history of the PGA Tour,” says Byron Chapman, senior manager of the MAM system. “It’s about the longevity of the sport. We don’t know what’s going to be important 20 years from now.”
On such example: in 2012, Bill Haas won the Los Angeles-area Northern Trust Open (now known as the Genesis Open). His father, Jay, had logged multiple top 10 finishes there in the 1990s, so CBS was able to show a split-screen of father and son teeing off side-by-side two decades apart.
Along with the typical requests from broadcasts and marketing departments, Raimondo says the MAM team has also fielded calls from caddies seeking to analyze putts and wives wanting to compile birthday videos for their husbands. More than 200 Tour employees and trusted partners currently have access to the system. The Tour’s social media department recently moved to the same building to blend both the production and entertainment content teams together.
Tournament footage has been synced with ShotLink since 2009. Within seconds, one can search for, say, John Rahm’s shots. There are more than 12,000. Select the filter for those that traveled farther than 300 yards, and there are 216 results. Longer than 325 yards: 74 shots. Or what about shots he hit into the water? 18. (Sorry, John.)
Vizrt’s Viz One Archive software provides the infrastructure for the Tour’s MAM system. Telestream Vantage manages file transcoding and workflows. The MAM archive also uses the AWS Rekognition cloud tool for image searches and Nexidia’s phonetic searches, both of which can support reviews of how well marketing relationships have gone. As an example, Raimondo queried how often “ice cream” was mentioned during the final round of the 2019 Honda Classic. Jack Nickalus was interviewed during that telecast in promotion of his ice cream brand; it was plugged five times.
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