This New LIV Streaming Feature Could One-Up PGA Tour Coverage

Starting this summer, LIV Golf is promising a new “Any Shot, Any Time” feature where fans will be able to select exactly which golfers, teams or groups they want to watch at any given moment.

The new streaming capabilities, which can be watched for free through the LIV Golf Plus app, will be built upon Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. Earlier today, Google Cloud and LIV announced a multi-year agreement that aims to “transform fan experiences through generative AI.”

In addition to watching any golfer during live competition, viewers will also have access to searchable and customizable on-demand highlight reels from any round of any LIV tournament. The Google Cloud partnership plans to enhance the on-course gallery experience by offering 3D aerial overviews of each venue, advanced real-time statistics, virtual caddie views and customized competition recaps.

Why This Could Be Important

The accuracy and depth of LIV’s statistics have been sketchy up to this point, so this new partnership could bring them up to speed on that front.

More importantly, LIV could be the first golf tour to consistently show every shot of every tournament.

The Masters and Players Championship have offered this in the past few years, but typical PGA Tour events don’t have the ability to show every shot live. There are too many players in the field and the cost to produce the content is excessive.

It’s a source of frustration when golf fans—particularly those gambling on a certain player—sit down for a traditional broadcast and can only watch the players shown. Switching between apps and paying for separate services can be clunky.

The PGA Tour has recently expanded its streaming effort on ESPN+, but it doesn’t come close to showing every shot. Current estimates are that only 60 percent of golf shots from a PGA Tour event are shown to the audience.

LIV has the luxury of a 54-player field—they’ve recently added some big names to bump the total up—and we know that cost isn’t much of a factor for them.

Golf has been desperate for something like this. The PGA Tour has not taken the fan experience seriously, one of the many reasons why its product has become endangered.

We’ll see exactly what it looks like later this year, but LIV could be heading down an interesting track here.