How the PGA TOUR is changing the media asset management game

Managing a media archive is no easy feat. Hollywood studios have spent years managing large archives containing feature films, episodic television, and, in some cases, animated content. When you consider content that appears beyond the screen, such as promotional materials to support the next blockbuster, the volume of content grows. A similar challenge holds true for sports content. And, with changing media partners, it’s not always clear where to locate footage of that heroic home run, the comeback touchdown, or the long birdie putt to win a major championship. The PGA TOUR is the top professional golf league in the world and holds a large content library that it organizes, protects, and makes accessible to a large and growing group of constituents.

The journey of PGA TOUR’s MAM, from on-premises to the cloud

The PGA TOUR captures hundreds of hours of raw footage during each golf tournament and needs to rapidly ingest, edit, and process this content for distribution to internal and external customers. As its media library grows exponentially, it was faced with potential resource challenges and shortcomings stemming from a legacy data management infrastructure. It needed a solution that could preserve 100 years of archival footage totaling more than 175,000 items, as well as a scalable system to better manage access to the PGA TOUR’s growing digital library to distribute content to media partners and fans in near real time.

In 2010, the PGA TOUR began its journey to deploy a media asset management (MAM) platform. The purpose of the MAM was to help the internal production team find specific pieces of content needed to enhance the storytelling for players and tournaments. For its MAM, the PGA TOUR selected VizRT, an Amazon Partner Network (APN) independent software vendor (ISV). VizRT deployed its MAM product called VizOne. VizOne had the ability to manage video assets across multiple tiers of on-premises storage, ranging from a highly performant storage area network (SAN) to an archive that included linear tape open (LTO) tapes and multiple drives to read and write files. Not only could VizOne manage the media, it was also used to associate valuable metadata such as scoring information provided by the TOUR’s proprietary scoring system. Scott Gutterman, SVP of Digital Operations at the PGA TOUR explains, “Everything is delivered with metadata…when we produce a clip and it goes into the MAM, the clip and metadata are paired together so that we are able to then go into the MAM and find any shot, at any time.” This is how the TOUR’s media partners find relevant content, and also how content is delivered to the PGA TOUR’s apps, and website.

Starting in 2013, the PGA TOUR worked with media partners to add content to their archive. Then, in 2021, PGA TOUR Entertainment worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate more than 7 petabytes of content to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). In this process, the PGA TOUR developed a multi-tier storage strategy keeping high resolution assets in Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, mezzanine media files on Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, and low-resolution proxy files stored on Amazon S3. With replication across regions and continued ingest of new content, the MAM archive is now 18 petabytes and growing.

Figure 1: The PGA TOUR MAM (architecture shown above) ingests live video from Amazon Elemental Live encoders to AWS Elemental MediaConnect which receives/sends video to multiple destinations including AWS Elemental MediaLive and Sienna for processing which runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute and Amazon FSx storage. These video files are ingested in to VizOne servers using Amazon EC2 with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage where multiple versions of a video file are created and stored in Amazon S3 as well as logging and metadata stored on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL. Telestream Vantage running on Amazon EC2 is a workflow engine used for transcoding and distribution/export out of the MAM. Video assets and database are replicated to alternate AWS Regions for disaster recovery purposes.

In 2021, the PGA TOUR realized a larger vision for its MAM. While still focused on preserving the history of the TOUR, the organization also wanted to enable quick and easy access to video assets for a large and growing number of internal and external constituents. Gutterman added, “As we began to grow, it became more and more obvious that we needed to make our MAM available over the internet and begin to make it broadly accessible to a wide variety of users.” The on-premises solution presented challenges such as queue-based content retrieval, meaning if two content creators were trying to access something on the same tape, they had to wait.

With media migration underway, PGA TOUR Entertainment also worked with APN partner VizRT to move its VizOne MAM platform and all workflows to AWS. Through this move, the PGA TOUR was able to remove the dependencies of on-premises hardware, decommission over 16,000 LTO tapes, and provide the ability to scale during tournaments. Typically, the PGA TOUR would manage 24 video streams, but during tournaments such as THE PLAYERS Championship, that could grow to upwards of 60 video streams. By moving VizOne to AWS, the PGA TOUR was able to make accessing and searching the MAM available to their consumers by the end of 2022. Now, the TOUR and its media partners are able to find historic clips entirely in the cloud, and on demand.

What does the future hold?
The establishment of a cloud-based MAM platform lets the PGA TOUR present its highly curated library to multiple internal and external stakeholders. The TOUR’s media partners have a fast and secure way to find shots that enhance storytelling and delight fans and viewers. As the sports media landscape evolves, the potential to create new channels, including free ad supported television (FAST) or other subscription services, is possible.

Also on the horizon is the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). AI and ML can be used to surface content fans want to see as they’re watching an event, or as production teams are looking for shots from previous tournaments that match a current event. For example, if Max Homa is getting ready to take his final shot at the TOUR Championship with a ball 20 feet from the pin, the TOUR can use AI and ML to present clips and associated metadata of him attempting a similar shot five times previously. This kind of access and data allows a production team to immediately add value to the broadcast or allow a fan to customize the type of data that they want to see.

As the PGA TOUR continues moving into new technological territory, it’s reinventing the fan experience, supporting players, and enriching the present and future of content. With instant access to archived clips of PGA TOUR tournaments and plans for AI and ML projects that bring together granular data about every shot taken, the PGA TOUR, with support from AWS, is changing the rules of the game so everybody wins.