The Future of ShotLink: More tours, more stats, more videos and fans in control

As for the future of the PGA Tour’s ShotLink, this is where AWS comes in and what should get PGA Tour fans most excited.

The current ShotLink system was developed nearly 20 years ago, and while some improvements have been made, the world of technology has evolved and fan expectations have changed. Golf lovers want video, stats and control – all in real time.

As Lovell puts it, the challenge is that he and his team must create the next ShotLink system that can deliver all that while simultaneously maintaining the current system. It’s akin to building a plane mid-flight.

The goal is to have the Every Shot Live experience that golf lovers experienced during the 2021 Players Championship become the standard. Right now, ShotLink only captures data on one course during multi-courses tournaments, but the Tour aspires to collect data on each at events such as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and the Farmers Insurance Open. All that will take streamlined logistics, better software and enhanced telecommunications networks, as well as more cameras, better sensors and lots of expensive, high-tech equipment.

Francessca Vasquez is the vice president of technology for AWS. Her company’s machine-learning capabilities and analytics tools are being used by several sports leagues, including Formula One and the National Football League, which uses AWS to develop next-generation statistics like those in the company’s commercials.

“We are in an evolution right now regarding how content gets created and how it gets distributed and what the experience is like,” said Vasquez, who not only plays golf but happily will tell you she plays the same pink Ping driver that Bubba Watson uses. “I think for the PGA Tour, they are trying to get that experience to their existing fan base, but there is an entire population that is not in the fan base right now that they want to be able to go out and acquire.

“To me, it is not one pillar that we are focused on. We are focused on engagement and who we have today, but we are also looking at how we can make the fan experience more enhanced, and in the process, how do we attract and acquire more fans who might not traditionally be into golf.”

To do that, AWS and the PGA Tour are creating a massive data repository that contains petabytes of previously shot footage and data. To give that figure some reference, a modern smartphone might have 128 or 256 gigabytes of storage, which is enough to hold about 50 Hollywood films. It takes 1,000 gigabytes to create a terabyte, and one thousand terabytes equals one petabyte. Added all together, it is years of video, audio and other data.

As it gets sorted and added to the system to make it accessible to all AWS’ systems and tools, the PGA Tour can start using it in new and better ways. And as new data is collected, the Tour and AWS aim to make it flow into the system in the ideal formats in real time.

That will allow ShotLink and the Tour to focus on developing new, fan-focused ways of seeing the game.

For example, in the not-too-distant future, the Tour could use AWS’ facial recognition tools to help cameras recognize players. So, whenever a camera spots Jordan Spieth, the AWS-enabled system could add the footage to a Spieth collection of content, tag it with a location and searchable keywords, then make it available to fans. Want to see all of Spieth’s putts from between 10 and 15 feet? Easy. All of his tee shots on par 3s? No problem. Every eagle, here you go. And all of it can be done faster and with fewer people involved in the process.

The system is not there yet, but according to Vasquez and Lovell, those are the kinds of things AWS and the PGA Tour want to deliver.

“The biggest area that I think the Tour wants to focus on is the all-around experience,” Vasquez said. “There will be new capabilities for things like StatCast and leaderboards, but the real value beyond just the data is creating an experience where end users feel like they are there.”

So while the PGA Tour works to bring data gathering and more stats to more tours in the weeks and months ahead, the future of ShotLink and how golf fans experience the game looks to have an even brighter future ahead.