The 95th PGA Championship is being held at the Oak Hill Country Club’s East Course in Rochester, N.Y. and if you cannot catch any (or all) of TNT’s 18 hours of broadcast coverage there are other options that will enable you to stay abreast of the tournament.
Turner Sports is seeking to provide one of the broadest multimedia sports presentations possible with its coverage of the PGA Championship starting tomorrow, the 23rd consecutive year that the network has covered the event.
There is first off PGA.Com, an online site that provides users with a variety of features about the event but possibly the most important for remote fans is that it provides live streaming via PGA Championship Live. It is designed for not only PC users but also available on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.
Among the features available from the app are a 360-degree camera that provides a panoramic view of the course and it has the ability to allow users to move the camera to get a view that matches their desire (aside from being there live). Fans can also look for highlights via its Video Highlight Hub so that they can witness all of the top moments and will allow fans to search and browse by player, round, hole or top moment from the 2013 PGA Championship.
For desktop users there is also a function that provides bird’s eye view of the interaction between players with an enhanced leaderboard that not only provides scores and highlights but also players interaction with each other around each hole
For mobile users there are also some specific features available as Turner has expanded its app from last year and added Android support in addition to the existing iOS features, although they offer slightly different features. For iOS users the user news, video alerts, detailed leaderboard and scorecards and access to live video streaming. The mobile web site will also offer live video, score updates and other news.
Turner is not forgetting social media and has a number of new, improved or returning features. In the new category s Twitter Mirror showing shots and comments from players that fans can view @PGA.Com. Twitter will also be showing video highlights at the Twitter address and fans can participate in join a chat site that will include journalists and players at #PGAChamp.
Turner is also offering a variety of extras such as Predict It, an interactive tournament prediction feature and “PGA Championship Pick the Hole Location Challenge Hosted by Jack Nicklaus” that will enable fans to select the location of the famous Par 3 on the 15th hole.
Hard to believe Turner can’t find a channel to get early coverage on broadcast. Only way to watch now in the morning is the “marquee group” which thankfully right now includes Tiger. But what if we wanted to see how David Toms is doing? N/A. PGA remains the wannabe when it comes to online and overall coverage. Is this a preview of how Fox golf coverage is going to be? Not all there?
And just in case you wanted to watch on mobile, it is about two minutes behind the online coverage. Saw Tiger’s birdie appear on Twitter before I saw it on the phone. Why so far behind? Again, poor resources and planning. Fourth in majors, indeed.