Chez Reavie plays a tee shot on the 8th hole during the third round of the CJ Cup at the Nine Bridges on Oct. 20, 2018 in Jeju, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
Discovery and the PGA Tour announced a new streaming service called GOLFTV on Monday. The global OTT platform will launch on Jan. 1, 2019, and will present more than 2,000 hours of live golf to international markets outside the U.S. next year.
GOLFTV will cover nearly 150 PGA Tour events per year, including The Players Championship, the FedExCup Playoffs and the Presidents Cup. The new platform is an expected development after Discovery signed a 12-year, $2-billion global media rights deal with the PGA Tour in June. Because the PGA Tour has moved from Disney to Discovery and NBC Sports, the ESPN+ platform will no longer carry golf.
“Building on Discovery’s heritage of real-life storytelling and direct-to-consumer platform experience, we’ve already established a world-class GOLFTV team,” said Alex Kaplan, President and General Manager, Discovery Golf, in a press release.
Discovery acquired the international streaming rights that were previously owned by Disney’s BAMTECH Media, which had operated the PGA Tour Live streaming app for both the U.S. and international markets since 2015. PGA Tour Live’s domestic streaming package will move to NBC Sports Gold for the 2019 season as part of a deal agreed in July.
According to Discovery’s press release, existing PGA Tour Live subscribers will be accommodated with a “simple transition” to GOLFTV ahead of the launch. The service will be available to subscribers in Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, and Spain for 2019. Poland and South Korea will follow in 2020, with Belgium, China, Germany, and South Africa being added in 2021. GOLFTV will launch in Britain, Denmark, Finland, India, Norway, and Sweden in 2021, and France in 2024.
Discovery has yet to reveal pricing for GOLFTV, but Variety reports that different subscription options are likely to be offered as well as snippets of free content. A future announcement from Discovery is expected to include additional programming details and a list of compatible streaming devices for GOLFTV.
SportTechie Takeaway
While Discovery is best known for popular cable TV channels such as the Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, and Animal Planet, the media company showed an interest in sports programming by broadcasting the 2018 Winter Olympics earlier this year. Discovery owns and operates Eurosport, a television network that has the European rights to the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
