LU800 encoders and LIQ™ intelligent connectivity give BMG the confidence to cover the full tournament course including holes broadcasters could never reach before.
Golf is widely recognized as one of the most challenging live sports to broadcast. Productions require hours of continuous, multi-location coverage where action shifts rapidly and the storyline changes across sprawling environments. For years, traditional golf broadcasting relied on heavy mobile units, miles of fiber runs, and massive field crews on-site.
Broadcast Management Group (BMG), a leader in integrated live production, creative services, broadcast engineering, and media technology, designed and deployed a custom REMI production ecosystem for The Pro Tour, a new professional golf tour featuring elite athletes from some of the world’s biggest sports leagues including the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL. LiveU’s LU800 field units and LIQ™ intelligent connectivity served as key components within BMG’s broader production workflow.
The workflow gave camera operators the freedom of movement and a new view from the green that has always been challenging to achieve, while eliminating the cost constraints, environmental strain, and access limitations of legacy OB trucks.
As the tour’s turnkey broadcast partner, BMG provided creative services, live production, engineering, transmission, media management, and distribution for each five-hour live broadcast.
Built for competitors who still want to compete at a high level upon retirement from the sport that defined their athletic careers, The Pro Tour takes place on premier golf courses across the country. Competitors include some of the most recognizable names in sports, including John Elway, John Smoltz, Vince Carter, Ray Allen, and JR Smith.
Golf courses are built for competition, not for television. Covering a full 18-hole course means obstacles such as dead zones, high operational and travel overhead, and rigid camera deployment. Course terrain often isolates specific holes from fixed fiber connections.
At the PGA National Resort in West Palm Beach, one crucial hole had reportedly never been televised because it fell outside the venue’s fixed fiber infrastructure. Traditional builds require shipping massive satellite trucks, running miles of cable through delicate course foliage, and flying large production teams on-site. Fiber-tethered setups prevent production teams from dynamically redeploying camera operators to follow emerging storylines as action unfolds. The old way would disrupt the course and the spectator experience – all for coverage that still left gaps.
BMG implemented a nearly fully wireless production workflow using LiveU LU800 bonded cellular transmission systems enhanced by LiveU IQ™ intelligent connectivity. Starlink was ready as backup connectivity, though according to BMG, never had to be deployed. This meant that the technical director, master control, and channel management team could work from home or the NOC.
The hybrid workflow dramatically shrunk the production footprint compared to a traditional cable-and-truck build, with more cameras able to cover more of the course because they’re no longer limited by where fiber happens to run. Every camera, including drone coverage, transmitted live feeds to BMG’s Network Operations Center (NOC), where AI continuously monitored available network conditions and automatically optimized connectivity across multiple cellular networks.
According to BMG CTO, Sean Wybourn, “going in, the team expected to run into holes it simply wouldn’t be able to cover: no good vantage point, no way to get fiber there. In practice, that didn’t happen. From the first day of the season, BMG never encountered an area on the course it couldn’t shoot.”
For BMG, the shift to a LiveU-powered REMI workflow has changed the economics and the possibilities of golf coverage at once:
Wybourn describes how the cable-free freedom allowed for closer up camera angles that provided more “eyes-view” perspective of the game itself from areas that simply weren’t reachable before. “Combining both looks, the wide traditional shots and the close, ground-level view, is where BMG sees the format heading long-term.”
“LiveU has been instrumental in delivering reliable, low-latency connectivity across the course, even across the different elevations and environments every hole presents, letting us capture key moments from perspectives that simply wouldn’t be workable otherwise,” added Wybourn. “Some of these courses are tight, and the better shots we’re getting are only happening because of LiveU. We’re following the golf, not the SDI cables.”
“It allows our crews in the field and our teams working remotely to stay connected throughout the show, helping produce consistent, high-quality broadcast coverage from stop to stop,” said Todd Mason, CEO, Broadcast Management Group.
“The Pro Tour let us design a broadcast ecosystem from the ground up, built around where the story was, not where cable could reach. LiveU's LU800, and LIQ intelligent connectivity gave our creative vision somewhere to actually run. Bringing creative services, live production, engineering, and distribution into one workflow gave us a scalable model that supports the tour today and can grow with it.”
Kathy Samuels, Director of Creative Services at Broadcast Management Group
