New PGA Tour Studios operational from its 165,000 square-foot facility in Ponte Vedra

The PGA Tour’s opening event last week at The Sentry didn’t only lift the lid on the 2025 season: it marked the first week of the Tour’s enhanced content delivery originating from its massive PGA Tour Studios in Ponte Vedra Beach, next door to the PGA Tour’s Global Home.

Ground was broken in 2022 on the 165,000-square-foot structure, which is more than four times larger than the previous PGA Tour Entertainment building at the World Golf Village. Testing of its complex media and digital operations has been ongoing since the fall of 2024.

Fans watching The Sentry on the Golf Channel broadcast or streaming services such as Peacock or NBC Sports no doubt enjoyed the scenic views of the Kapalua Plantation course in Maui, Hawaii.

Behind the scenes, back in Ponte Vedra, the equipment and assets located in eight production rooms, eight audio-control rooms, and seven LED-outfitted studios (including a 270-degree LED display in Studio 1A enhanced the broadcast and studio shows was well on way to a simple yet ambitious goal: to show as many shots as possible, with the dream one day of fans never missing a swing they wanted to see from their favorite player.

There are 180 employees of Tour Studios at launch, with planned expansion to 300.

Delivering more golf shots, more content is the goal

The huge building and increased assets were necessary to keep up with the demands for PGA Tour content across all platforms — which is all about showing as many golf shots as possible during a tournament day.

“Ten years ago, it was just the network broadcast,” said Michael Raimondo, the Tour’s Vice-President of Broadcast Technology. “It was three hours a day, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We started doing PGA Tour Live, showed a feature group in the morning, one in the afternoon, expanded that this past year to four streams. Ten years ago we showed about 3 percent of all shots. Now we’re showing 28-to-30 percent of all shots.”

Raimondo also said viewing habits have changed dramatically with the ability of fans to access content on their phones and pads.

“There were a lot of windows that were not available for people to watch golf,” he said. “Golf has 24 groups in the morning and 24 in the afternoon. You want to watch your guy but you can’t watch him both days because he’ll have a morning and afternoon tee time. Let’s make sure we cover that entirely.”

The Tour is also launching its World Feed in 2025, which will enable fans in Japan to watch Hideki Matsuyama play every shot in every tournament, or Korean fans to watch Sungae Im.

PGA Tour Media outgrew St. Augustine facility

All that ambitious programming needed more cameras, more production equipment and more studio, pre-game and post-game shows. That’s why the 37,000-square-foot building in St. Augustine had become obsolete.

“We had some very basic technical limitations,” said Andrew Wisniewski, PGA Tour Media’s Vice-President of Engineering. “How many cameras can we bring into the truck? How many replay devices can we have? How many people can we physically put in a room? If we want to have more cameras, if we want to focus on showing different feeds to different parts of the world, we didn’t physically have the space to do it.”

Wisniewski also said having more cameras on the course to record more shots isn’t enough. There needs to be a production facility with the capacity to record those shots for replay.

“Under the [St. Augustine] set up, we could only record a very limited number of cameras,” he said. “Let’s say we have 60 cameras on the golf course. We can only record a handful of them. Which means someone could make a hole-in-one and we might miss it. The way this facility is built we’re going to be recording every camera that’s out there, all the time.”

PGA Tour Studios will be the home for all PGA Tour Media operations, including live production of PGA Tour Champions and Korn Ferry Tour events, more than 5,000 hours annually of PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ and the Tour’s list of more than 50 original, social and digital media platforms.

What else is new about PGA Tour Studios?

The building will house the largest library of golf content in the world with more than 170,000 videos and 223,000 hours of content, dating back to 1920.

There is a video review center with access to all camera feeds for on-air rulings.

A sound technician will monitor the live broadcasts and be able to blip out audible profanities by players or fans.

There is a 34-seat theater to screen Tour content.

The Studios will house “Pro Shop,” the Tour’s partner in Hollywood that creates premium content that combines golf and pop culture.

PGA Tour Studios by the numbers

165,000: square footage of the Studios headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach.
7: Studios in operation at launch, with eventual growth to 12.
15-20: Studio television cameras.
8: Production control rooms, with eventual growth to 13.
8: Audio control rooms, with eventual growth to 13.
9: “PGA Tour Fleet” production trucks, the technical core for seven live shows, the network broadcast, four PGA Tour Live streams and two live streams for gaming partners.
180: employees, with a predicted expansion to 300.