Discovery and the PGA Tour to launch GolfTV

Discovery Golf has partnered with the PGA Tour to launch GolfTV, an on-demand international streaming service, on January 1st 2019.

Discovery partnered with the PGA tour back in June, which gave Discovery all live and non-live rights on linear and digital platforms to the PGA Tour. GolfTV will be replacing PGA Tour Live.

GolfTV will include live and on-demand content, and global and localized content. The main goal is for fans to have access to all of the content they want in the same place. Golf is one of the only sports that is already unquestionably global, and it makes sense that there should be a unified platform on which fans can watch the live action as well as access other content.

But although golf is a global sport and GolfTV will be a global platform, fans will be able to localise their feeds based on location, the players that they are interested in, and even the angle from which they want to watch. Localisation of the sport will make it more personal for viewers and easier to follow the things that they are interested in, without seeing the things that they aren’t interested in.

Alex Kaplan, President and General Manager at Discovery golf told SportsPro in an interview: “One thing I want to be clear on is that what we launch with in January will basically be our beta launch. It will be a great product that focuses on live and on-demand content and will be a very clean, user-friendly experience. But this is phase one.”

Discover intends for GolfTV to be golf’s main platform in the future. Kaplan adds, “We found through our research that linear is not necessarily how people think about TV anymore. They see it as content that appears across multiple strands.” By using multiple platforms, GolfTV will be able to reach all fans of golf, whether it be on TV or via digital channels.

Although the prices for GolfTV have not been revealed yet, Kaplan said that their would be different tiers at different prices, as well as some free content. Having different packages is another aspect that makes GolfTV a global platform that is accessible to fans everywhere.

GolfTV will be the first all-encompassing global platform for any one sport, so it will be interesting to see what successes they have and challenges they face in the coming years.

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Parker Sikes
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Parker Sikes is an American student studying advertising in London. Follow her on Twitter at @sikespar.

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