NEW YORK: The PGA Tour continues to extend its string of innovations, coming up with a Content Relevancy Engine (CRE) alongside tech giant, Microsoft. Although their 3-year data analytics partnership will be expiring this year, this innovation is likely to extend it further.
To come up with this new solution, the PGA has utilized its scoring system called ShotLink which is powered by its technology partner, CDW apart from Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. It is expected to help broadcasters filter and compare key statistics and content in order to look for those interesting patterns that tell a fascinating story to fans. To identify player shots, clips and highlights manually has traditionally been time consuming and has limited the number of videos produced.
However, CRE will make the process automated and faster, which will enable content producers to deliver information to fans across social platforms and mediums such as its app and website, quicker as well. It is believed that this move will also help PGA’s reach increase further and more effective.
“One of the goals we have on PGA TOUR LIVE is to show compelling information for every shot, and for every player for every tournament, we have more than 400 shots of content (six featured players in every PGA TOUR event, 72 strokes on average). The new solution creates volume and is more efficient, which frees up our broadcast and social teams to focus on more creative stories,” Steve Evans, PGA Tour’s senior vice president of Information Systems said.
“What’s really exciting here is that if you’re in a highlight production business, you decide what’s compelling for fans. The problem with that is being limited by not understanding context. For instance, if we’ve got a young player the general fan hasn’t heard of, and we’ve captured 50 video clips of that player throughout the course of the tournament, none of which would have probably merited a producer making the decision to say, hey, that’s a highlight clip.”
“But let’s say that player wins the tournament in some exciting fashion and it gathers a lot of attention and people are now interested in learning more about that player. The fact that we’ve automated all of the video highlights makes us immediately able to share those and make them available to the fans. These nuggets are compelling to provide context to the shot that they’re seeing,” Evans added.
“Say a player has shot from a bunker to win a tournament, and it looks like they’re about to do it again. Some producers might remember footage of that previous win or the great fan reaction that went with it, but there’s only so much a producer can keep in his head. This solution could send messages to a video producer in a broadcast truck, suggesting clips to play and other content that’s available.”
“We really set out some lofty goals to create that automation and then we coupled that with really good technology and now we’re basically realizing it and reinforcing that was the right direction.”
“Our goal as an organization is to continue this kind of innovation for the foreseeable future because we can always make it better and do more. We’ve won the hearts and minds of a number of people who probably initially thought we were talking about things that couldn’t be done.”
