As the 2026 FIFA World Cup continues into its second week, another major sports event takes center stage today: the 126th U.S. Open Championship. Held this year at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y., golf fans from around the world will be watching as the sport’s best compete for one of its most prestigious titles.

Like global events such as the World Cup, the U.S. Open presents complex broadcast production challenges. Covering more than 150 players across an expansive course requires production teams to capture, process and distribute massive amounts of content in real time. Broadcasters must seamlessly integrate shot-tracking data, player statistics and performance analytics while delivering compelling coverage across traditional television, streaming platforms and international markets.

Industry leaders explored how emerging technologies are transforming golf production during NAB Show’s session “How the PGA TOUR Teed Up Automated Broadcast Production,” featuring PGA Tour’s Michael Raiondo, vice president of Broadcast Technology, and Amazon Web Services’ Jason Dvorkin, head of business development, Americas. The discussion highlighted how the PGA Tour is leveraging its ShotLink scoring platform, event-driven architectures and Agentic AI to automate key elements of live production workflows.

The scale alone illustrates why automation has become such an important focus. As Raiondo explained, “We produce about 7,000 hours of golf content in a year.” To support initiatives such as Every Shot Live, PGA Tour has expanded coverage from showing just a fraction of the tournament to delivering significantly more content to fans worldwide.

ShotLink sits at the center of this architecture. “When that data hits a certain mark,” Raiondo said, it can trigger production actions such as switching from a tee camera to a green camera. PGA Tour also built “a custom interface between our scoring system and the API with the video switcher, as well as our graphics engine” to auto-switch feeds.

The session also underscored the growing importance of metadata throughout the broadcast chain. Raiondo shared a vision that can resonate with many broadcast engineers and technologists: “I want my metadata at the very beginning of the media supply chain.” By embedding data earlier in production workflows, broadcasters can unlock new opportunities for automation, replay, graphics generation and personalized viewing experiences.

As fans tune into this week’s U.S. Open, they will see more than world-class golf. They will experience another example of cloud production, real-time data, automation and AI shaping the future of sports broadcasting.

Signal of the Week

Catch the full session ahead of the U.S. Open, where you can learn how the PGA Tour was able to automate live broadcast production, scale coverage across multiple courses and transform how golf broadcast is viewed worldwide!

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