Television broadcasts of sports events bring many challenges to networks that carry them, and golf is no exception.
In fact, golf in some ways is more difficult to cover than other sports.
At any given moment at a PGA Tour event, there could be 100 golfers on the course with 10 or more golf balls in the air, said Andrew Wisniewski, vice president of engineering for the PGA Tour. It takes a lot to cover it all.
“Golf is a little bit different,” Wisniewski said to visitors at the new PGA Tour Studios building in Ponte Vedra Beach.
The 165,000-square-foot facility officially opened Jan. 1 adjacent to the 187,000-square-foot PGA Tour headquarters building, which opened in 2021 off of Palm Valley Road west of Florida A1A.
PGA Tour Studios will be the center for broadcasting golf events all over the world, for all of the networks that cover them.
Wherever golf tournaments are held, the broadcast will be produced in Ponte Vedra Beach.
The new facility replaces a 37,500-square-foot building at the World Golf Village in St. Augustine that had been the home of PGA Tour media since 1997.
Besides being bigger in size, the new facility is equipped with much more advanced technology than could have been imagined when the original building opened.
“Even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago for most people, that’s really before the Internet and cellphones,” Wisniewski said.
The old facility had one television studio with two production control rooms and two audio control rooms, but the bigger building has seven studios with eight production and audio rooms.
The studios are equipped with “new and cool things” such as LED walls and floors to change the look of the studios for different programming.
“You can tell a story better than you can in the current studios,” Wisniewski said.
“The building is not built for today. This is for the future beyond today,” said Michael Raimondo, vice president of broadcast technology for the PGA Tour.
The facilities allow the PGA Tour to broadcast programming all over the world at all hours of the day, with live streaming content in addition to the traditional television broadcast.
“We decided there were a lot of windows where people wanted to watch golf,” Raimondo said.
“Everything we’re doing here is to get more content out,” he said.
With its production capabilities, PGA Tour Studios can capture action from up to 144 cameras.
Besides live tournaments, PGA Tour Studios also will produce other content about golf. The PGA Tour said the facility has the largest library of golf content in the world with more than 223,000 hours of video content.
The PGA Tour does not have exact employment numbers for the new facility but said it can accommodate up to 300 workers, compared with 180 at its previous facilities.
Employees began moving into the new building in October but it officially took over production of PGA Tour events Jan. 2 with the broadcast of The Sentry tournament from Hawaii.
The PGA Tour began planning and designing the new studios in 2017 and broke ground on the facility in 2022.
When the PGA Tour was seeking incentives from St. Johns County to build the facility, it said it expected to invest about $100 million in the project.
The county’s Board of County Commissioners approved an incentive package valued at about $16.8 million in 2021 for the project.
The PGA Tour said independent research firm RKG estimated its economic impact on Northeast Florida exceeds $1 billion, including headquarters operations and the annual Players Championship tournament in March.
It said the new studio adds $112 million in total impact.
“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,” PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said in a news release.
