Eleven Sports to show 2018 PGA Championship for free across multiple platforms

Eleven Sports has been expanding its UK and Ireland rights portfolio at pace, and have announced today that next month’s PGA Championship will be shown live on the platform, too.

The company, owned by Leeds United owner Andrea Radrizzani, announced itself as a major player in the broadcast media landscape in May with the capture of La Liga rights from Sky Sports.

Since then, they’ve added Serie A rights as well as the Eredivisie, the Chinese Super League and others to their portfolio. Now, the company have announced that this year’s PGA Championship – the final golf major of the year – will find a home on the platform and will be available for free across ‘multiple platforms’.  The tournament will take place from 9-12 August at Bellerive Golf Course.

The platforms in question are the Eleven Sports app as well as their Facebook page, showing the versatility that new live-streaming platforms possess and the flexibility they also have when it comes to distribution across various platforms.

It’s also a boost for the live-streaming service in terms of UK and Ireland marketing, too, as viewers tuning into what promises to be another hotly contested golf major will get a free taster of the platform just a week before the start of both the Serie A and La Liga seasons.

The announcement that Seb Carmichael-Brown, host of the popular Seb on Golf YouTube channel, will be part of the coverage shows an intention to add a modern freshness to the output and probably shows that Eleven are looking to do things a bit differently: it could well be an indicator of how they will approach the coverage of other sports, too.

With Amazon Prime taking Premier League rights, Facebook snapping up more and more live sport around the world, and DAZN launching its newest streaming service in the USA, live-streaming platforms in sport are starting to become premium broadcasters in their own right. It’s now clear that OTT platforms can bid for and win the rights to show the biggest and most sought-after content.

It’s not the first time the PGA Championship will be streamed live on Facebook in the UK and Ireland. Last year, the PGA partnered with Give Me Sport to broadcast the tournament on the social media platform.

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Chris McMullan
Chris McMullan 831 posts

Chris is a sports journalist and editor of Digital Sport - follow him on Twitter @CJMcMullan_

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