PGA – Page 4

Updated PGA Tour 14 app greets new season

January 14, 2014 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

The PGA Tour has revamped its existing PGA Tour ’14 app from the ground up to offer an enhanced experience for fans that are both attending its events as well as ones that are following tournaments from remote locations.

Using apps at events is very popular because a fan might be following one group but is interested in a host of players and how they are doing not just hole by hole but shot by shot and the app addresses this and much more with enhanced existing features as well as additional ones.

Starting off it gives you a live, up to the second leaderboard. As a leaderboard feature there are players’ listings that can provide a thumbnail profile of the player, current scorecards and video of select shots. From there the fan, if they so desire, can follow an individual players’ live scorecard that now features play by play with shot trails and live up to date stats. The tee shot trails feature is only available at courses that support ShotLink laser technology.

Moving from the individual to the group there is the ability to check on groupings with both time and location of tee times. There is video on demand that provides a wide variety of features including player features, recaps of every round and tournament highlights. Of course the entire season schedule is also available.

The PGA Tour ’14 app covers approximately 130 tournaments featuring the PGA Tour, Champions Tour, Web.com Tour, NEC Series-PGA TOUR Latinoamérica, PGA TOUR Canada and PGA TOUR China. The app is available for both Android and iOS devices.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Athlete to Follow, British Open, Golf, iOS, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, PGA Tagged With: Android, iOS, PGA, PGA Tour 14

PGA promotion enables fans to select tour pairing

December 19, 2013 by Greg Quick 3 Comments

It often seems that fans want to be part the action, it pretty much does not matter which sports (OK not too much in ones such as boxing and MMA) and you often see fans run onto the field such as with Hank Aaron’s historic home run.

Years ago baseball innovator Bill Veeck had a game where the fans could call plays during an actual MLB game, something MLB quickly put an end to. Now the PGA is taking a page from his playbook and is allowing fans to select a pairing at a tournament.

The PGA Tour has announced that fans will be able to select a pairing in the first round of the 2014 Hyundai Tournament of Champions via votes between now and the end of the year.

The vote, which takes place on the PGATOUR.com’s Social Hub to determine who will be paired with defending champion Dustin Johnson for the first round. The Tour is offering three choices so no write ins please. The choices are 2013 Masters champion Adam Scott; 2012 FedExCup champion Brandt Snedeker; or six-time PGA TOUR winner Matt Kuchar.

The Hyundai Tournament of Champions returns to The Plantation Course at Kapalua in Maui, Hawaii from Jan. 2-6, 2014 and the pairings, or should I say winner, will be announced the day before the event tees up.

The PGA says that it believes that the “Hyundai You Pair the Pros” event will result in a deep engagement of its fans to the tour, and that makes sense. It provides an additional level of rooting interest during the round as you can watch to see how the player you voted for does.

It sounds as if this might just be the first of many social media driven activities that the PGA plans on launching this season, and it will be interesting to see how well fans embrace the events.

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, PGA, Social Media, Social Media Data Tagged With: 2014 Hyundai Tournament of Champions, contest, PGA Tour, Social Media

PGA Tour Develops Social Media Hub in time for FedExCup

August 22, 2013 by Greg Quick Leave a Comment

Two-year-old startup Mass Relevance has teamed with the PGA to create the PGA Tour Social Hub, a website that will serve as a central aggregation point for a wide variety of social media content that pertains to the PGA tour.

The Hub is being launched in time for fans to use it to follow the action for the FedExCup Playoffs, which begin today with The Barclays at Liberty National in New Jersey City.

The website, which can be located here, will use content filters that seek out relevant content including keyword and hashtag searches. Among the media sites that will be represented at the Hub will be Twitter, Facebook, YouTube videos and Instagram photos and videos.

The PGA said that one of the driving reasons was that fans often used different hashtags or terminology when tweeting or communicating about events and that by creating a single unifying site it will make it easier for fans to follow events as well as comment on them in real time.

For Mass Relevance, founded in 2011 with almost $2 million in seed funding from Floodgate and Austin Ventures it is the continuation of the SaaS developers rise as a leading partner to a wide and growing set of clients.

The company has partnered with experience developing golf-focused social hubs, having previously created one with TaylorMade-adidas Golf Partners earlier this year and developed worked on a program with Callaway Golf to bring social media to serious golfers. Other partners include the Washington Redskins, Twitter, MTV, Pepsi, Campbell’s, GE, Target, Walgreens and Microsoft.

Filed Under: Apps, Facebook, Golf, Instagram, PGA, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Sports Social Media Data, Twitter, YouTube Tagged With: Facebook, FedExCup, Instagram, Mass Relevance, PGA Tour, Social Media, Twitter

Viewers flock to on-air and digital PGA Championship broadcasts

August 13, 2013 by Greg Quick 1 Comment

The Turner Sports decision to present an aggressive online presence for the PGA Championship as well as strong over the air coverage resulted in strong results as the event sees big growth in viewership in both areas.

The over the air broadcast of the 2013 PGA Championship from the Oak Hill Country Club East Course in Pittsford, N.Y., shown on TNT received the network’s highest rating for the event in 3 years with an average of 1.6 million viewers, up 54% from last year. It had an average of 1.2 U.S. house hold rating, a 50% increase from last year.

Probably as no surprise most of the top regions in terms of viewership are also hot golfing destinations and all rated much higher than the national average. They were markets for all four rounds of coverage on TNT were Las Vegas (2.7), West Palm Beach (2.6), Columbus (2.4), Greenville, S.C. (2.4) and Orlando (2.3).

While the broadcast numbers were strong, the digital numbers were even stronger, showing that there is a large market that wants to experience sporting events but often cannot get away to view them on television.

The PGA.Com umbrella that handles both mobile and broadband streaming delivery was up 69% during the Championship and live streaming hours across platforms are up 85% compared with 2012.

Filed Under: Apps, Contests, Golf, Nielsen Ratings, PGA, TNT, Turner Sports Tagged With: PGA, PGA Championship, TNT, Turner Sports

Turner Sports Goes All-in On PGA Championship Coverage

August 7, 2013 by Greg Quick 3 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Golf, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Live sports via mobile, Live Sports Video Consumption, PGA, Sports Social Media, Tablets, Turner Sports Tagged With: Android, iOS, PGA Championship, Turner Sports, Twitter

AT&T Deploys ‘Mobile DAS’ to Answer Big-Event Needs

July 11, 2013 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

AT&T’s Mobile DAS truck

For many sporting events these days, it’s a challenge to bring the mobile connectivity fans want and need when onsite. It’s an especially challenging task at outdoor events like golf tournaments, where infrastructure may be limited and large numbers of fans may be congregated in hard-to-reach areas, like near tees and greens.

At the recent Crowne Plaza Invitational at Colonial PGA Tour stop in Fort Worth, Texas, AT&T brought some new technology to handle fans’ mobile needs: A mobile DAS, or distributed antenna system, deployment that delivered much more granular cellular coverage to the event than other solutions, like cell towers on wheels (COWs) were capable of bringing.

Simply, by putting DAS head-end equipment into a truck (pictured above) and then by putting up a lot of smaller antennas around the course, AT&T was able to provide more coverage where it was needed, one of the hallmarks of any DAS system. With a few COWs on site as well, AT&T provided a much better level of connectivity than ever before, according to Chad Townes, VP of AT&T’s antenna solutions group.

“Your first choice is always to put in permanent infrastructure, and leave it there if we can,” said Townes in a phone interview earlier this week. But at many places where coverage is needed, like the Colonial Country Club, it simply isn’t possible to string wire and put up antennas. In the past, what cellular providers typically did in one-time situations was bring in the COWs, the cell antennas on wheels. The problem with those antennas, Townes said, is that they sometimes interfered with each other (if parked too closely together), plus they run into the same limitations a regular macro tower has, mainly an inability to handle a big, compact crowd of phone users.

Chad Townes, VP, AT&T Antenna Solutions Group

Enter the mDAS, which Townes said was “created kind of out of necessity.” With numerous smaller antennas (which don’t interfere with each other as much) AT&T was able to provide much more targeted cellular coverage, a key for events like golf tournaments where fans are often clustered in areas like hospitality tents or greenside stands. Media and tournament officials also put heavy wireless demands on providers, and the mDAS was used to satisfy those bandwidth needs as well.

Townes said AT&T’s mDAS actually got its first test run at the Democratic National Convention a couple years ago, when AT&T didn’t want to sign a long-term DAS lease with the facility the convention was held in. The DAS truck was built, and the antennas were put up the day of the event, with great success. The next question was: Where to use mDAS next?

Inside the AT&T mDAS truck

“Now that we had this asset, what could we do with it?” Townes said. Golf tournaments made instant sense, given their one-time needs for coverage and the infrastructure challenges of an open grassy field. Where else might AT&T deploy mDAS in the future? Maybe at state fairs, or motor sport events held on downtown streets, or big-crowd music festivals, Townes said.

Townes, who is scheduled to speak at the upcoming SEAT conference in Kansas City, said the mDAS was just another way AT&T has responded to the always-changing and never-the-same needs when it comes to providing big-event connectivity.

“Even when you’re putting wireless into stadiums, no two are alike because there are always differences in building materials, or the shape of the bowl,” Townes said. The mDAS, he added, “was just another example of how we had to get real creative” to solve an event’s connectivity needs. (AT&T video about the mDAS at Colonial below)

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, PGA Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, PGA, Wi-Fi

Updated PGA Tour 14 app greets new season

Viewers flock to on-air and digital PGA Championship broadcasts

AT&T Deploys ‘Mobile DAS’ to Answer Big-Event Needs

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