PGA Tour Studios in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida Courtesy PGA Tour
For international markets hungry to watch their own players compete at the highest level in golf, the PGA Tour will feed the world what it wants.
Starting with the 2025 Players Championship, the PGA Tour is launching the World Feed from its new 165,000 square foot PGA Tour Studios adjacent to the tour’s headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. The World Feed will be a separate dedicated broadcast to serve international media partners with locally relevant content while simultaneously following the leaders and the overall competition.
While it begins with a big splash in the shadow of the PGA Tour Studios at the Players, the World Feed will continue every week through the rest of the 2025 FedEx Cup season. The eventual goal is to produce localized live feeds specific to certain countries, with native language announcers and graphics.
“This is an important step – the first of many – as PGA Tour Studios comes online and we create more opportunities to showcase our world-class athletes and championships to an ever-growing audience,” said Rick Anderson, the PGA Tour’s chief commercial officer.
Designed to improve the international fan experience, the World Feed will feature customized coverage, graphics and storytelling of the tour’s international players using a dedicated international commentary team. The live telecast will feature a weekly on-site reporter and include up to six dedicated cameras focused on international golfers at select events. Capturing more focused coverage of international players will also allow the tour to curate and distribute enhanced content across its social and digital platforms.
“The PGA Tour is proud to give international golf fans exactly what they want – more coverage of their country’s favorite players each and every week,” said Luis Goicouria, PGA Tour senior vice president, media.
For more than 20 years, the tour has delivered an Enhanced International Feed (EIF). But that’s generally been an augmented domestic production exported to the 200-plus countries and territories covered by the tour’s 39 broadcast deals around the world. (The Canadian market uses the U.S. network product.)
“It’s been great for us,” Kate Sharp, the tour’s senior vice president of international media, said of the EIF. “We’ve built an international media business off the back of it, and it has been a good product. But when we think about what our fans and partners are actually viewing, it’s really a U.S. product that’s being exported. It’s being cleaned up a little bit, removing some of the sponsorship, filling in the blanks with live golf and an announcer here in Ponte Vedra. But it isn’t really touching what the international viewers would really like to see.”
The World Feed will take care of that. Excluding Americans and Canadians, there are 49 players representing 22 countries in this week’s Players field. With 133 cameras on site at TPC Sawgrass capturing every shot, the World Feed’s dedicated production team can draw live footage from international players in its own separate broadcast. Each week’s feed will feature a host and two analysts based at PGA Tour Studios as well as an on-site walking correspondent.
The broadcast host will rotate among established voices John Swantek, Taylor Zarzour, Brian Katrek, Ned Michaels and Matt Adams. The analyst team includes Billy Kratzert, Craig Perks, Brendon de Jonge, Steve Scott and James Nitties among others while the on-site walking crew includes John Maginnes, Colin Swanton, Andres Gonzalez and Emilia Doran. Sky Sports in the United Kingdom will often be able to provide its own voices including Wayne Riley, Rob Lee, Nick Dougherty, Andrew Coltart, Rich Beem and Laura Davies. Fox Sports Australia has Paul Gow scheduled as analyst for a few events.
“We’re talking to our other partners that might want to supply their talent,” said Greg Hopfe, senior VP of live television and the executive producer of PGA Tour Entertainment. “So it really gives it an international feel and mix.”
“Just the cleanness and the amount of golf shots we can get in compared to the network, and just the seamless look of everything from start to finish … I’m telling you, when you see these things side by side, it really is quite night and day.” – Kate Sharp
The inaugural World Feed from the Players will use the team of Swantek, Perks, Kratzert and Gonzalez. It starts with the first round and will run the same hours the PGA Tour’s U.S. domestic partners are on the air (1-7 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday).
International fans will immediately notice a big difference with the World Feed, which won’t be littered with NBC, CBS or Golf Channel logos or anything else that doesn’t resonate internationally. Both Sharp and Hopfe, who’ve seen the test show from last month’s Genesis Invitational, used the phrase “night and day” comparing the World Feed to the EIF.
“Just the cleanness and the amount of golf shots we can get in compared to the network, and just the seamless look of everything from start to finish … I’m telling you, when you see these things side by side, it really is quite night and day,” Sharp said of the presentation with its own exclusive wipes, colors, content and graphics. “I hope the message and the feeling that we get from viewers is that it just looks like such a polished broadcast. They’re seeing more golf and they’re seeing the people that they want to see.”
All of it will be produced every week from its own dedicated control room inside the state-of-the-art PGA Tour Studios, which is roughly a Rory McIlroy drive from the tee of the famous 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass. “We have our own producer, director, talent … the exact same that you’d find in a CBS or NBC truck,” said Hopfe.
Staff perform a live on-air test run of the World Feed in Control Room 1B at PGA Tour Studios. Keyur Khamar, PGA Tour
Sharp, a native Australian who’s been with the PGA Tour for 19 years, has seen the data and understands the appetite for curated coverage in markets outside North America.
“We know that our international players move the needle for both us and for our partners,” she said. “You know when we see Viktor Hovland, when he was performing fantastically a couple years ago, or when we have Ludvig Åberg now performing so well. I mean, the numbers that we see in their local markets, Norway and Sweden, are just unbelievable. So we know that you need to be focusing more on international players, that’s what the partners and the fans want to see. But we’re also obviously delivering the storyline of the tournament as well. We’re not getting away from that, but what people will see now is really more of a focus on their local heroes and the international players featured in any given tournament.”
While it’s currently only one World Feed for all markets outside the U.S. and Canada, Sharp says the long-term goal is to be more locally curated.
“I think the broader goal and ambition is to be able to scale this World Feed for more localization,” she said. “Whether that means localizing and having a Japanese feed with Japanese graphics and Japanese talent, or whether that means localizing sponsorship … we’re seeing what the appetite is for that and then having feeds that are regional.
“Obviously, that’s really dictated by market demand and what the interest is but I think we feel pretty confident. We have a couple of big Asian markets and a couple of big renewals coming up, and I think we’ll definitely explore what the appetite is there.”
The World Feed is just one of several innovations PGA Tour Studios is rolling out this year. It already launched a live betting stream providing key data, insights and live gambling analysis during coverage on PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ at the WM Phoenix Open. The ESPN Bet branded stream will also feature at the Players, Truist, Memorial, Travelers and FedEx St. Jude Championship. A show for Golf Channel called “The Drop” is expected to debut at the RBC Heritage.
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