PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Luis Goicouria’s vision for PGA Tour Studios has become reality.
On March 13, the PGA Tour’s World Feed went live for the first time at the Players Championship, the culmination of several years of work.
“When I came in here and saw this for the first time, it blew me away,” said Goicouria, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of media. “What I had in my head was this. We’ve never been able to present it this way. To see it presented this way kind of brought home how cool it all was.”
Inside the 165,000-square-foot facility, which officially opened on Jan. 1, are eight production rooms, seven LED-outfitted studios, and the capacity to manage up to 144 live feeds. It positions PGA Tour to produce live and original content without relying on traditional media partners.
For more than 20 years, the Tour has delivered an enhanced International Feed. But that basically consisted of a U.S. product exported to 200-plus countries and territories covered by the Tour’s 39 broadcast deals around the world with fill-ins during the commercials, leaderboards and some of the sponsorship opportunities.
“It didn’t really work well for international fans and partners,” said Kate Sharp, the Tour’s senior vice president of international media and client services. “It’s a long time coming.”
Now, the World Feed can cater specifically to global markets, featuring custom graphics and cameras focused on international golfers and its own team of talent. At the Players, Golf Channel showed Hideki Matsuyama twice during Thursday’s broadcast and the world feed showed him 27 times.
“That’s the purpose of the world feed,” she said. “I liken it to being in-between an European Tour broadcast and a U.S, network feed.”
The Tour conducted a live test of the world feed during the Genesis Invitational last month and produced four hours of live coverage. Sharp said the international feed showed about 650 golf shots compared to CBS doing 350.
“They have other obligations, they are talking to a different audience,” she said in explaining the vast difference in golf shots shown.
The World Feed allows for a separate broadcast to focus on the international players in the field, including Australia’s Min Woo Lee, who was the 36-hole leader, with locally relevant content while simultaneously following the leaders and the overall competition.
Following its debut this week, the World Feed will be produced for all remaining events on the 2025 schedule. All of it will be produced every week from its own dedicated control room inside the state-of-the-art PGA Tour Studios.
Launching the World Feed is the first step toward producing localized live feeds specific to certain countries, with native language announcers and graphics, in the coming years and a major step toward improving the international fan experience.
“Our goal is to show more international players, do more international storytelling and speak to international fans in a different voice than is traditionally done so domestically,” Sharp said.
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