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Published by The First Call Golf

The PGA Tour is rebuilding its mobile app with an Instagram-style story feature to view video highlights for individual players, among other storytelling upgrades through new content visuals and ShotLink statistics. AWS’s cloud services are powering the infrastructure to deliver content within the app.

“What you’re going to see in the app is a lot of imagery, a lot of videos, much deeper stats, and scoring that’s being delivered faster than any place else across the internet,” says Scott Gutterman, the PGA Tour’s SVP of digital operations. “We think those in combination with a much cleaner look and feel, and even fewer ad positions, fans will have a much better and more engaging experience.”

A limited version of the new mobile app debuts today while the PGA Tour will formally introduce its fully revamped app and website during the Sentry Tournament of Champions in January. Fans will also be able to access their tickets for PGA Tour-managed events through the new mobile app, which will stream player-personalized highlights from WSC Sports, the automated production platform also used by the NBA, NHL, MLS, and NASCAR.

“If you favorite Scottie Scheffler, at the end of the day when his round is done, you’ll get a video story that summarizes how he’s done throughout the day,” Gutterman says. “We will have video stories in our app pretty much like what you see in Instagram reels or TikTok. We tend to do 7,000-8,000 highlights a week domestically. They will now be presented in a much more user-friendly format, where if Rory McIlroy has five to 10 highlights here in the U.S., you’ll see those nicely lined up as you press and watch all of his highlights.”

There are also plans to roll out daily fantasy and sports betting integrations into the mobile app from the PGA Tour’s gaming partners.

We will have video stories in our app pretty much like what you see in Instagram reels or TikTok. We tend to do 7,000-8,000 highlights a week domestically. They will now be presented in a much more user-friendly format, where if Rory McIlroy has five to 10 highlights here in the U.S., you’ll see those nicely lined up as you press and watch all of his highlights.

“Our thinking is that if you have a daily fantasy lineup, or say you have a series of players that you bet on, being able to possibly import that from one of those accounts into our app, is what we want to do,” adds Eric Hanson, VP of product development at the PGA Tour. “We also have what we call an odds leaderboard. And if you’re in a legal betting state, we actually have those odds tap through to the betting operators, so that you can place a bet through one of those betting operators. We’re also bringing that to our website. It’s going to have a column on the leaderboard with odds-on by default.”

The PGA Tour’s in-house software team led development of its new app and website alongside support from vendors Work & Co, CapTech, Shockoe, and Ensemble. Quintar, the official mobile augmented reality developer for the PGA Tour, previously made AR course activations for on-site fans to view in the PGA Tour AR app, but those features will soon merge into the upgraded main mobile app from the Tour.

“Starting with the Players Championship this year, our AR features will be built into the main PGA Tour app, which in the past were in a separate PGA Tour AR app,” Gutterman says. “We’re still doing work with Quintar, and we’ll do that at about eight to 10 events again this coming season.”