AWS is How: The PGA TOUR Increases Agility and Reduces Costs in the Cloud
2022
The PGA TOUR is an organization for touring professional golfers that co-sanctions tournaments on several golf tours. Founded by players in 1968, the PGA TOUR, a nonprofit organization, holds regular events across the United States and in multiple other countries. The PGA TOUR includes golfers from 28 countries and territories outside the United States.
Benefits on AWS
- Reduced bandwidth requirements by 35% during enhanced live streaming
- Simplified media encoding, processing, and distribution
- Created a reliable viewer experience across devices
- Streamed over 750 hours of live content and 32,000 shots
“Using AWS Media Services, we made this experience possible while reducing bandwidth requirements by as much as 35 percent, so we can save on costs without ever compromising on image integrity.”
Scott Gutterman
Senior Vice President of Digital Operations, the PGA TOUR
Enhancing Live Streaming
Professional golf organization the PGA TOUR streams live events globally, but it wanted to enhance the fan experience while simplifying its video production and delivery and improving reliability. It migrated its streaming workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS), using AWS Media Services to simplify content delivery and AWS Elemental MediaLive to encode video in the cloud. It also uses several other AWS services to process and stream content. Using machine learning (ML) on AWS, the PGA TOUR has accelerated video processing and built the "Every Shot Live" feature while reducing costs and simplifying distribution to partners.
Enhanced Reliability
The PGA TOUR built new features, such as “Every Shot Live,” that give more control to users while improving reliability across devices on AWS. In addition, the PGA TOUR’s broadcast team can preconfigure its production setup in the cloud well in advance to improve reliability as soon as the tournament begins.
Improved Streaming
Increased Agility
By running its setup in the cloud, the PGA TOUR can provision resources and scale up more quickly and simply than ever. As a result, it can support increasing numbers of viewers and higher demand while still delivering its high-quality, low-latency content.
Reduced Costs
The PGA TOUR reduced its overall costs by moving its video processing, formatting, and streaming workloads to the cloud. It lowered its bandwidth requirements by 35 percent and reduced its gear footprint on the course without decreasing image quality or stream reliability.
The PGA TOUR Reimagines Fan Experience on AWS
The PGA TOUR is using ML, natural language processing, storage, compute, analytics, and database capabilities of AWS to deliver an enhanced golf fan experience for fans.