Golf’s PGA Tour has today (Monday) renewed and expanded its content agreement with Twitter, with the social media platform to distribute nearly 140 hours of live competition from OTT service PGA Tour Live across 28 tournaments during the 2018-19 season.
The multi-year agreement will allow Twitter to stream the first 60 to 90 minutes from the morning hours of all four rounds of PGA Tour Live’s OTT subscription window, on a global basis for free. The addition of Saturday and Sunday morning coverage will result in the most live PGA Tour content ever offered on Twitter.
As part of the Fans First initiative, the Tour will also launch Fan Vote Fridays, giving fans the chance to vote, via Twitter to determine one of the two featured groups that will be showcased during Friday’s coverage, for each tournament streamed on Twitter. Fans will also have pre-tournament access with live streams from the driving range each week.
Twitter will begin live streaming at the Desert Classic in Palm Springs, California, on January 17. The four-round coverage on Twitter will begin at the Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego and conclude in August at the season-ending Tour Championship in Atlanta, where the FedExCup champion will be crowned.
The live coverage will be available globally on Twitter via @PGATOUR, with promotional support and additional content via @GOLFTV, the Tour’s newly launched media partnership with Discovery Communications.
“The evolution of our streaming partnership with Twitter over the past three years has led to extraordinary feedback from our fans globally,” Rick Anderson, chief media officer of the PGA Tour, said.
“We continue to reach an ever-growing young, diverse and loyal audience allowing us to expand and improve the product with live programming, real time highlights and video-on-demand content.”
The PGA Tour and Twitter initially teamed up to live stream tournament coverage when portions of PGA Tour Live’s premium window was streamed during the opening rounds of the first two events of the 2016 FedExCup Playoffs.
The two companies formalised their live stream relationship in January 2017 when they agreed to stream PGA Tour Live coverage from select events during the 2016-17 season.