NEW YORK — After two months of the PGA Tour using Twitter as its exclusive global live stream distribution platform, both organizations have expressed how pleased they are with the deal.
For free, golf fans have been able to use Twitter to watch live competition with coverage typically including the first 60 to 90 minutes from the early Thursday and Friday morning hours of PGA TOUR LIVE’s OTT subscription window. The ability for hardcore golf fans to watch the first two holes of rounds that serve to determine who makes the cut has been something they have taken advantage of.
“The PGA has been a wonderful success,” Twitter COO Anthony Noto said at last week’s Leaders Sport Business Summit. It’s exceeded our expectations both from an audience standpoint and an economic standpoint and built on the existing relationship that we have with the PGA through Amplify, which is the highlights business that we built four years ago.
“The opportunity for the PGA is to bring to the PGA fans — to golf fans — live programming when it’s not available on television…delivering underserved audiences of the content they love during those early rounds. We have over 70 hours of programming from the PGA (in the 2017 season) that we think has really delivered on the appetite that golf you just have but they’re not getting access to during the early rounds. It’s also a global product which we’ve been able to deliver an incremental audience outside the U.S. because of the fact that we are a global platform and not just limited to the United States, so it’s been positive in a number of regards.”
Get The Latest Golf Tech News In Your Inbox!
The window of time when golf fans can watch on Twitter gives them an idea of what PGA TOUR LIVE has to offer, PGA Tour Entertainment senior producer Chris Sinclair said Tuesday on a Tagboard webinar.
“That has helped greatly,” Sinclair said. “Obviously, it helped drive subscription rates because once people get a free taste of what we’re providing, especially if you’re a fan, there’s just no reason not be a part of it. And I think that’s helped in turn the amount of interaction with the Twitter account. That’s gone way up since we’ve been doing live Twitter in the mornings. It’s great.”
Asked about the future of live streaming, Sinclair made reference to a Recode report last week on how Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and YouTube are bidding to stream the NFL’s Thursday Night Football games next season.
“The competition is making it so that there comes the demand and because so many people are cutting their cord, this is where they’re getting their information,” Sinclair said. “It really makes you if you’re an ESPN or something like that, it definitely makes you run for the exits a little bit because it can be a problem in a couple of years, especially with ESPN’s model being subscription-based with cable and all that.
“I see it growing and growing, and the more that internet live streaming takes place, I feel like it’s really the consumers who are in the best possible situation right now. It’s definitely a buyer’s market at this point with all that competition out there. It’s a time to be a consumer.”