The PGA Tour Studios building officially opened on January 1st.
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A walk through the PGA Tour’s new studio building in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., evokes an unmistakable comparison.
If the building’s next door neighbor, PGA Tour HQ, is the Death Star – then THIS building, PGA Tour Studios, IS Death Star II. They are mirror images of each other, each stretching across the horizon in masses of darkly colored glass, and each arming the PGA Tour to achieve its goals of interplanetary dominance.
If you ask those at Tour, the brand new campus, which officially opened on New Year’s Day, will be Tour’s bridge (or should we say gap) for the future. Tour HQ will house the day-to-day operations of golf’s largest professional tour, and its next-door neighbor will house the day-to-day operations of Tournament Money Making Business: media.
“Look, the purpose of the building beyond anything is to bring better content to our fans. To increase the level of production, the quality of production and the quality of content that we bring to our fans,” says Luis Goicouria, Tour SVP of media. “Because at the end of the day, it all boils down to that, right? This is number one. We feel like if you do that, your business grows.”
With the critical exception of network telecast editorial operations (those will remain with NBC and CBS), everything touched by PGA Tour “media” will go through Death Star II. This includes YouTube, player content, PGA Tour Live and international broadcasts, studio shows and anything else not already paid for by CBS, NBC and Golf Channel. In a world where sports leagues are much closer to media companies than ticket sellers, this makes the new PGA Tour studios the most valuable space in the tour business without a machine box or a green box.
No one will dispute that the new facility is dazzling. The building contains 165,000 square feet of space; seven studios (with capacity to grow to 12), six studios with massive LED walls, eight control rooms, eight sound rooms and, yes, a cinema. Now open, the new facility will house all of PGA Tour Live’s broadcast production, allow for the creation of several international specific broadcast resources, and give the Tour the capacity to create more content than ever before. first, including sports ones. much outside of golf. In a twist, perhaps the most impressive part of the entire facility is that it is not in it: The Tour built 25 percent of the new facility to sit empty on opening day, future-proofing the building for whatever shiny new gadgets become part of the Tour’s media business on 25 the coming years.
But these great statistics fail to plug a critical plot hole: Why build another one The Death Star? Even among those familiar with sports media, there is little consensus as to why the Tour chose to spend untold millions building a new media facility, especially as other leagues are downsizing their indoor media, consolidating efforts for content and, in the NFL’s case, threatening to dismantle certain parts of their state operation altogether. Even if the untold millions for the Tour’s new facility were to get the green light in 2019, long before golf’s money mania reached its peak and set these trends across the sport, the case of business is curious. In a world where sports media companies are learning to build entire programming schedules with fewer voices, smaller expenses and tighter budgets, is it smart for the Tour to quadruple down on the same businesses?
Perhaps that thinking misses a critical part of the PGA Tour. The essence of a brand new studio building is not about high-tech studios or office space next door to the tech company; it’s about something much simpler: Control.
“I think it’s not just production control. I think it is in general control of our product,” says Goicouria, Tour SVP of media. “That includes the product and it includes the production of our live events.”
It’s not a secret that the media is the golden goose at PGA Tour headquarters — or any other money-making sport league in the modern world. Years of strong ratings and stable viewership demographics have made sports one of the world’s most valuable advertising grounds, meaning more money for the networks that broadcast sports, the governing bodies that host them and the athletes who compete in them. theirs.
The good news for the tournament is that the value of sports television rights has never been higher. The decline of the cable television model has only strengthened the value of sports rights, because sports rights have proven to be the only broadcast television capable of delivering large network audiences in a post-cable world. As a result, the leagues have been making cash — and growing exponentially every few years — for the better part of the past decade.
But this high hand has created an undercurrent of danger. As the value of sports television rights has skyrocketed, so has the percentage of the PGA Tour’s overall revenue tied to television deals. If anything were to happen to the value of those rights, or to the networks paying for them, the Tour would be involved big trouble.
This kind of thinking towards risk exposure is, to be clear, a good problem for the PGA Tour, which has made billions in the new paradigm of sports rights. It is also one unlikely problem; there is no evidence that we are living in a so-called “sports rights bubble” and the networks have still managed to stop profiting from the wildly inflated cost of TV rights. But like an X-Wing flying through the center of Death Star II, it’s a problem of grave consequence, which brings us back to the new building in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
In that sense, PGA Tour Studios is a physical part of PGA Tour control. The building allows the Tour to dictate all parts of its television and media rights without outside production assistance. In a way, the new facility is a piece of risk mitigation, allowing the Tour to protect its rear if something happens to one of its longtime broadcast partners, NBC or CBS, at the end of the season. current rights deal in 2029. In another, it’s a piece of old-fashioned leverage that gives the Tour the freedom to pursue any The next TV partner must have another bid beat NBC or CBS. That kind of leverage is especially important given the exploding world of sports streaming, where tech companies like Amazon, Netflix and Apple have shown a willingness to throw ridiculous sums of money for sports rightsbut preferred not to be confused with expensive production staffs.
