The post The secret truth of the ESPN-YouTube TV feud appeared first on Golf.

The post The secret truth of the ESPN-YouTube TV feud appeared first on Golf.

“ESPN is trying to make us think this is YouTube TV’s fault, when they’re actually just trying to add new subscribers to their new standalone DTC app,” a now-viral post from the X account @JoshOnAir reads. “Unbelievable. Don’t fall for it people. ESPN / Disney are the worst.”

@JoshOnAir’s opinion was parroted in a handful of viral posts that only seemed to gain steam over the weekend, as consumers missed out on three days’ worth of college and pro football on ESPN networks. It was easy to understand the frustration: Sports fans were missing out despite their role as dutifully paying customers, while the suits at YouTube TV and Disney haggled over shekels in a stalemate with no end date in sight.

Before long, the arguments fell across familiar political lines: Greedy corporations exploiting the common man, profits stolen with little concern for consumers, and the continued enshittification of yet another valued institution.

But there was a problem. These arguments were largely … untrue. The stalemate between ESPN and YouTube TV wasn’t about ESPN’s efforts to remove itself from cable TV, but about ESPN’s still considerable desire to remain on cable. The network was holding onto an inconvenient secret about its business, and the showdown with YouTube TV provided a glimpse behind the curtain.

——

More than any show or talking head, ESPN’s success can be traced back to a single holy grail: For every viewer who tunes in, ESPN gets paid twice.

First, advertisers pay ESPN for the right to air commercials, and second, cable providers pay ESPN for the right to air the network. This second payment is called a “carriage fee,” and it amounts to around $10 per subscriber per month — an enormous coup responsible for much of ESPN’s profitability over the last three decades.

Carriage fees are operated on a contractual basis, and need to be renegotiated every few years, which is what led to the current stalemate between YouTube and ESPN. According to YouTube TV, ESPN is asking for too much from its next set of carriage fees, while according to ESPN, YouTube TV wants a better rate than any of its cable TV counterparts.

As with most corporate disputes, the truth lies somewhere between, and is overshadowed by a much larger reality: The cable TV model is collapsing. Today, cord-cutting has made the cable business resemble the newspaper business of 30 years ago: Still profitable, but steadily losing ground. The latest estimates place standard pay-TV bundles in 65 million homes, down from more than 105 million in 2010.

For ESPN, the downside of that shift is potentially cataclysmic. The network has been backed into a corner: Either raise the cost of carriage fees consistent with the decline in cable customers, or find a way to recoup that money directly from consumers.

That rock-and-hard-place leads us into today’s rock-and-hard-place: Where ESPN has launched its own direct-to-consumer app allowing sports fans to pay $30 per month for an all-access pass to the network, and where a feud with YouTube TV over increased carriage fees has spilled out into the open.

If you find yourself thinking, doesn’t this feud help ESPN launch its new product, speeding the eventuality of cable TV’s demise? Well, you’d be correct. Except for one key point: ESPN doesn’t want its customers fleeing cable TV for a $30/month app. In an interview on Peter Kafka’s brilliant Channels podcast last month, ESPN CEO Jimmy Pitaro laid out the issue plainly.

“If you access us directly, the biggest problem we are going to have is churn,” Pitaro said. “If you go back to the [cable] ecosystem, you don’t have much of a churn problem. It’s really easy for me to turn a streaming service on or off. I do it all the time. It’s much harder for me to do it on cable.”

Pitaro’s point? Every cable subscriber lost for the ESPN DTC app represents a high-risk departure. The goal is to slowly build the DTC audience, eventually creating an ESPN app that provides value to customers for 12 months out of the year, discouraging people from holding their subscriptions only during, say, football season.

In Pitaro’s view, the goal of the new app is to pull from the 60 million people who have left cable in the last two decades, not the 65 million who remain, because the 65 million who remain present a low-risk path to billions in revenue in the short term.

“We’ve wanted to protect [traditional cable],” Pitaro said. “By the way, we still believe there’s a ton of value in the traditional ecosystem.”

The subtext of this point is hard to ignore. For the time being at least, ESPN needs cable providers at least as much as cable providers need the network. In the current fight for the latest batch of carriage fees, that sense of leverage might provide YouTube TV with an upper-hand.

Of course, that upper-hand might manifest in several weeks without ESPN on YouTube TV — an ugly outcome that would harm both sides of the carriage fight. But with nearly eight weeks until the next stretch of golf programming on the network — the launch of TGL season two on Dec. 28 — golf fans have plenty of time.

Rest assured, an agreement will be reached, and lots of money will be made. That’s the way the cable business has always worked for ESPN. But those times are changing … and in the long term, that might not be a bad thing for the people paying.

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The post 5 takeaways from a Bryson DeChambeau YouTube deep dive appeared first on Golf.

The post 5 takeaways from a Bryson DeChambeau YouTube deep dive appeared first on Golf.

At first, it’s just a kernel of an idea. But then it becomes more than that: A feeling, and before long, a very real question.

Why does he bother doing anything else?

That is the Bryson Effect, as best as I can describe it. He’s not quite revolutionizing the game through a mass of muscle or a law of physics as much as he is through the power of YouTube. It sounds trite, but the truth is inarguable: Bryson has blossomed from a golf superstar into an internet hero, the rare person capable of attracting the attention of both Mr. Nicklaus and Mr. Beast. With 2.5 million subscribers and a steady well of access to celebrities and viral stars, Bryson’s channel has sprouted into the kind of place where fans of all backgrounds can enter golf without fear of pretense or boredom.

So, how’d he do it? I hit the couch — erhm, books — for a week and took a look into the things that make Bryson a viral megastar, and I found a few common themes.

1. Authenticity

I can feel your eyes rolling already. In the eyes of some golf fans (and for good reason), Bryson is not the YouTube star he portends to be and spends plenty of his golfing hours outside of the heavily edited bubble of YouTube (and inside the heavily edited bubble of golf television) whiny or mopey or picking fights with his Ryder Cup opponents.

But DeChambeau has told us time and time again that YouTube is the place where he feels like he can be his goofiest self. While that might not manifest in the pained expressions that often find their way into his thumbnails, it does manifest in the videos that wind up on his channel.

When the cameras are rolling in his YouTube videos, Bryson shows a side of himself we don’t usually see on the golf course — someone who shares anecdotes from his time around great players, who approaches his famous guests with an air of curiosity and sincerity, and who isn’t afraid to laugh at himself. His vibe is unabashedly goofy and intentionally hyperbolic, and while that plays as some as a joke, I find it in line with the person I’ve seen when the cameras are off.

While Bryson might be a fierce — and sometimes overly intense — tournament competitor, that side of himself rarely finds its way into his videos. Instead his clips feel much more like an outgrowth of a sports-obsessed 15-year-old, not the fever-dream of a coldly calculating businessman.

2. Production Value

Bryson is not the only pro golfer to enter the world of YouTube over these last several years, but he is one of the few pros who has legitimately committed to the quality and consistency of his production setup.

His footage utilizes a series of high-fidelity cameras shot at tight intervals and edited with top-of-the-line graphics. In the Steph Curry Break 50, keen eyes catch how Bryson waited until his car has stopped driving to engage in conversation with Curry, ensuring a steadier camera shot and crisper audio, while drones and a multitude of shooters combine to ensure that no big moment goes missing. No, it’s not quite Citizen Kane, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

The truth is that this stuff isn’t that complicated to pull off, but so many YouTube-presenting brands fail at the easy stuff, yielding high-effort videos that disappear into an uncaring algorithm within seconds of publishing. If Bryson’s videos fail to perform, it’s never for a lack of technical knowhow, and considering the man at the center of this production is one of the best professional golfers alive, I give him credit.

3. Algorithmic understanding

I’m not sure if the credit for this one belongs to Bryson himself, but it’s clear somebody in his orbit understands the real business of YouTube, where videos are sorted based on the amount of attention they attract.

Bryson’s franchises feature a clear, understandable hook, a terrific thumbnail, and a first-minute edit that combine to entice viewers to keep watching (Break 50 being the best example of these traits). As the size of his YouTube production has grown, so has the scale of his videos, which now feature (comparatively) tasteful product integration and hour-plus run-times, helping to drive up the “Average View Duration” metric that decides whether videos perform or flop.

4. Celebrity access!

Here’s where it helps to have a deep Rolodex. Bryson has quickly stumbled into the true great skill of incredibly successful content creators: His inbound comes to him.

Thanks to his golf fame and YouTube bonafides, the work of securing high-quality, high-entertainment guests has dramatically eased. Celebrities like Steph Curry will join the show knowing they’ll get something out of the endeavor, too, be it YouTube subscribers, golf invites, sponsorships, or some combination of the three.

5. Golf ability

There is something to be said about the feeling of suspended belief you have while watching one of the great players of this generation attempt to break 50 in a two-man scramble from the forward tees. Whether DeChambeau performs or flops, he is the center of the show — and the general feeling of infinite possibility serves as a dose of lighter fluid to each of his videos.

Is his golfing ability enough to make it interesting no matter what Bryson does? No, and that’s why so many other pro golf types have failed where he has succeeded. But Bryson’s ability of all of the above, combined with his golf goodness, makes his golf goodness hard to ignore.

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The post The unusual lesson from Barstool’s $1 million ‘Internet Invitational’ appeared first on Golf.

The post The unusual lesson from Barstool’s $1 million ‘Internet Invitational’ appeared first on Golf.

After some squabbles, they settled on a name, a format and a revenue-sharing agreement.

Thus, the PGA Tour was born.

Sixty years later, golf fans of a different variety watched as a new all-star collection of golfers came together to maximize exposure and compete for a large prize.

They were not players but influencers, competing in Barstool’s “Internet Invitational” — a six-part, hours-long bonanza featuring 48 golfers competing for the chance at $1 million. Their medium of choice was YouTube, but the thrust of their video wasn’t entirely counting birdies and bogeys. Participation in the event was one part golf competition, one part reality TV series, and several parts performing for the camera.

Immediately, this group of influencers found that their pooled skills were at least comparably successful to the sum of their parts — generating nearly 2 million views in under 24 hours and seizing a stranglehold on the golf discourse in the midst of an otherwise quiet week on the calendar. It did not take long for this collection of YouTubers to find that golf fans of all ages and backgrounds were at least willing to give them a shot, or for golf fans to realize they might wind up entertained.

All of it raised a question that seemed outlandish until quite recently: When it came to bringing together the best influencers in golf regularly, was Barstool onto something?

These are strange times in the world of sports. Leagues continue to act like media companies and media companies continue to act like leagues, a closing loop that has blurred lines at events like the Internet Invitational and the PGA Tour’s forthcoming Good Good Championship. Those who put on golf tournaments are now responsible for YouTube highlights and social media commentary, while those who make YouTube highlights and social media commentary are now responsible for … competing in golf tournaments.

The golden goose undercutting it all is the currency of our time: Attention. Attention serves as the conduit between consumers and products, and it is a diminishing asset in a world saturated with distractions. Everybody in the sports world — from big tech to big football to Big Cat — is in the game of attention. Those who can reliably attract attention can attract advertising, and those who can attract advertising can attract money.

Barstool is under no illusions about coalescing the entirety of golf’s internet talent in one place on a permanent (or touring) basis. And of course, even if Barstool were under any illusions about creating an Influencer Tour, it’s unlikely they would ever generate enough business to consider the PGA Tour or LIV a legitimate competitor. But the strangest lesson from the Internet Invitational is that, at least in terms of attention, the gap between the influencers and the pros isn’t nearly as wide as it seems.

Of course, that’s not to say that the businesses are comparable, or that the influencers are leaving money on the table by retaining their own YouTube fiefdoms with occasional cross-appearances for the purposes of audience growth. It is merely to say that, in all likelihood, the week’s most compelling golf tournament will take place entirely on the internet, featuring a field composed of zero full-time professional golfers, playing for a prize fund not much smaller than a typical PGA Tour event. In the world of democratized distribution through social media platforms like YouTube, it’s not hard to see a world where this format proves repeatable … and profitable.

In the end, the next several days are likely to reveal the ways in which the Internet Invitational can’t compare with a traditional golf competition. The play will be mostly average, the drama will be somewhat contrived, and the people on camera will play to those cameras, fully aware of the game they’re playing.

But it can compete in the way that matters most: People will pay attention. Glorious, valuable attention.

There’s money to be made that way. Lots of it.

You can watch the first Internet Invitational video below.

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The post TGL adds new NHL/MLB ownership group to its investor class appeared first on Golf.

The post TGL adds new NHL/MLB ownership group to its investor class appeared first on Golf.

On Friday afternoon, the TGL announced that the LAGC will receive a new minority ownership stake from Ilitch Sports and Entertainment. The ownership group behind the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings will join an ownership group that includes Reddit founder and majority owner Alexis Ohanian and a deep bench of minority owners including Serena and Venus Williams, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Alex Morgan, Michelle Wie West, Shonda Rhimes and Good Good Golf.

Financial terms of the agreement were not released, but several fascinating components of Ilitch’s investment in the TGL were announced. As part of Ilitch’s investment in the LAGC, IS+E will “serve as LAGC’s sponsorship agency of record and act as an extension of LAGC’s internal team” — a move that effectively multiplies the sales efforts of the LAGC franchise as its second season readies to begin in late December.

The decision will allow IS+E to “leverage its network and expertise in sponsorship sales, brand development, data analytics, broadcasting and media” to help the LAGC brand grow.

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The Ilitch family’s investment in LAGC comes at an interesting time for the TGL, which will begin its second season at the Sofi Center in Palm Beach Gardens on December 28. The indoor simulator golf league debuted to surprisingly strong TV numbers on ESPN in 2024, bringing golf to primetime weeknights in concert with the bulk of the PGA Tour season. Last week, the league announced a slew of changes aimed at improving the league’s competitive product in year two, including dramatically expanding the size and shape of the putting green.

The announcement also comes at an interesting time for the Illitches. The Illitch family investment in the TGL is notable for who it is not pairing with: Motor City G.C., owned by the Ford Family, also known as the longtime stewards of the other major Detroit sports organization, the Lions.

In addition to owning and operating the fast food chain Little Caesars, the Illitches maintain majority stakes in both the Tigers and Red Wings, and operate the majority of their businesses out of Detroit. They are believed to have a strong relationship with the Fords, including in their shared funding of a downtown arena district at the turn of the century.

“LAGC is reimagining how fans experience golf,” Ryan Gustafson, the president and CEO of Illitch Sports and Entertainment said in a release. “Joining LAGC puts us at the center of that transformation.”

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The post Golf Channel is bringing back a beloved show … with a YouTube twist appeared first on Golf.

The post Golf Channel is bringing back a beloved show … with a YouTube twist appeared first on Golf.

The irony in question? Primarily that at the time The Big Break was in its Golf Channel heyday, most of the Good Good gang wasn’t old enough to watch it.

Still, the news is good for lifelong fans of the show (or more recent fans of one of YouTube golf’s most prominent brands): The Big Break has been greenlit by Golf Channel executives to return to audiences in late 2026, and Good Good is at the center of the operation.

According to a press release announcing the return, Golf Channel and Good Good will combine to produce a new edition of the longtime reality TV show, with a sponsor’s exemption into next November’s newly announced Good Good Championship (a PGA Tour fall series event) on the line for the winner.

To date, The Big Break remains Golf Channel’s most notable success in the world of original programming — a reality TV series that ran for a record 23 seasons from 2003 to 2015 and helped birth the careers of several notable golf figures, including Tony Finau. The new edition of the reality show will feature a heavy dose of Golf Channel’s content partners at Good Good golf, the 2-million-subscriber YouTube channel and merchandise monolith. Good Good and Golf Channel signed a content partnership in 2024 that has seen a host of new programming come to the network via the YouTube channel, though to date the partnership has focused more on one-off events than recurring series’ like Big Break.

The new season of the reality TV show will include the YouTube brand in its name — airing under the title of Big Break x Good Good — and will feature Good Good talent as both on-air fixtures and on-camera competitors. Golf Channel personality (and one-time Big Break contestant) Blair O’Neal will co-host the show alongside Good Good’s Matt Scharff, while Garrett Clark and Bubbie Broders will serve as non-playing team captains from the YouTube world. Brad Dalke and Sean Walsh — two ex-pros turned content creators for Good Good — will be two of the 12 competitors in the new season of the show, which will take place at Horseshoe Bay Resort near Austin, Texas, not far from the sight of next November’s PGA Tour fall season event.

The announcement marks the latest in a series of falling boundaries between the worlds of YouTube golf and the sport’s establishment, which has recently redoubled its own efforts to appeal to younger and broader audiences. Good Good’s exposure as a brand of well-coiffed, well-trained TV faces has helped its cross-medium exposure through outfits like the “Creator Classic” and more traditional content partnerships like Golf Channel’s.

The upside for both ends of the business is obvious: Golf Channel earns the ability to introduce its programming to a younger and different audience base, while Good Good earns the establishment credibility of Golf Channel and exposure to the network’s own audience. The Big Break represents the marriage of these ideas, and both parties hope, the intersection of an environment where they can both make money.

It is too soon to say if that idea will prove to be a success, but for old-school Golf Channel fans and new-school YouTube fans alike, there’s reason to tune in.

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The post Why pro golf’s business leaders should be listening to … Taylor Swift? appeared first on Golf.

The post Why pro golf’s business leaders should be listening to … Taylor Swift? appeared first on Golf.

Your NFL games, your Thanksgiving tables and your Instagram feeds have turned Swift from a pop music superstar into a regular piece of your everyday life — so, like most other pieces of your everyday life, you have developed feelings.

This turns out to be the most impressive thing about Taylor Swift — not your opinion, but the fact you have one. It reflects Swift’s greatest success as an artist: Her ability to make fortune out of her fame, and vice versa.

The first part of that equation — fame — has been liability in the pro golf world over the last decade. As the pro game has evolved from a part-time sprint into a 50-week-per-year marathon, the outcome hasn’t quite been Swiftmania. Rather than obsessing over pro golf, many fans have lapsed into a state of ambivalence — fatigued by the length of the season, the lack of anticipation or cohesion between events, and the slog of 11.5 months without a break. Players have felt it, too; when LIV entered the sport in the early 2020s, its defectors touted schedule freedom as one of the deciding factors in taking the plunge (though tens of millions in signing bonuses certainly didn’t hurt).

At the time of pro golf’s schedule expansion, the prevailing theory held that adding events was a necessary component of golf’s desire for ever-growing fortune. (If players wanted to make more money, the theory went, they had to provide more hours of television coverage to the networks.) In some ways, this theory proved true — the enhanced schedule helped the PGA Tour ink a historic set of 10-year rights agreements in 2019, and LIV expanded its own schedule to bolster revenue as its losses crept near $5 billion.

But adding volume without concern for quality was always a flawed strategy. Consider how it might look if the business in question was your local diner. Your diner’s ability to make money is constrained by the number of tables in its dining room, but its business is much more directly affected by the quality of its food. Your local diner could make more money by building an additional dining room, but if it came at the expense of the food quality (or even the food consistency), the momentary boost in revenue wouldn’t be worth the long-term decline in reputation. Your diner’s most loyal customers (the diehards) might stick around and learn the plates that still worked, but its exposure to the broader community would be stunted, and the business would start shrinking.

This type of trend is what new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp has been hired to reverse. Rolapp, a longtime NFL executive, has entered the lead job at golf’s largest pro tour promising “significant change” to the business. He has been careful to mention scarcity and simplicity as two of his administration’s primary focuses — scaling back the size and menu of the PGA Tour restaurant in pursuit of a better overall meal.

“I think the focus will be to create events that really matter,” Rolapp said. “Competition should be easy to follow. The regular season and postseason should be connected in a way that builds towards the Tour Championship in a way that all sports fans can understand.”

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Of course, the same argument works in reverse: Adding quality without concern for volume is also a bad idea. If your local diner was the best restaurant in town but only could seat 10 people per night, it might achieve great fame, but it might never amass a great fortune. What good would it be to run the best restaurant in town if you couldn’t afford to pay your rent?

This brings us back to Swift, the pop star with the best of both worlds: fame and fortune, quality and volume. Two weeks ago, Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, shattered another set of music industry records, including the biggest sales week of any album ever. Later, Swift followed up that act by announcing her latest creative endeavor: A Disney+ mini-series following her through the making of another multi-billion-dollar entity, the Eras tour. These newly sprouted money trees were only part of a broader list of new Taylor Swift offerings that surrounded the album release, like a limited-release movie theater run during the album’s opening weekend, a limited-edition vinyl in Summertime Pink Spritz Shimmer, or the New Heights podcast appearance that set the whole album machine in motion.

You did not need to look long at Swift over these last few weeks to see a unifying theory emerge: Swift has a core product (her music), an events business (her world tour(s)), a video business (her TV and film offerings) and a hard products business (vinyls, merch and other goodies.) In each of these tentacles, Swift has built entry points for every type of consumer: Her casual fans (people who know her face when they see her on Sunday Night Football), her core audience (her regular listeners and concert attendees) and her diehard audience (her superfans). In each of these tentacles and to each group of fans, Swift has an innate sense of how to deliver the goods, from catchy Billboard No. 1s to the hidden metaphors inside a deep well of “secret tracks.”

At the intersection of the worlds of quality and volume, Swift has found … both. She has built the music world’s biggest diner and supplied it with a massive marketing budget, a never-ending stream of regulars and a special off-menu menu for the diehards. Everywhere you look, Swift is selling a product that reinforces her fame and enlarges her fortune.

The result? Swift is a billionaire, claiming a net worth of $1.6 billion in 2025, according to Forbes, and an unquestioned vice grip on the title of world’s most famous celebrity.

The Swift lesson for pro golf is simple: The choice between quality and volume is not binary. You can have both, but you cannot have it easily. The balance between these two traits exists on a razor’s edge — and requires an incredibly deft hand.

After all, without Swift’s obsession with the infinitesimally small details of songwriting and composition, she never could have authored of a steady stream of No. 1 hits. And without No. 1 hit status, she never could have dreamt of worldwide fame. Without worldwide fame, Swift could never have pulled off a cultural phenomenon like the Eras tour. And without the Eras tour — and the massive, skillfully operated business underpinning it — Swift could never dream of billionaire status or a regular seat at your Thanksgiving table.

It is in these small details that fortunes are won and lost, and in these small details that pro golf faces a massive opportunity. The sport already has no shortage of volume and plenty of quality — now it must marry those things together to become a business much greater than the sum of its parts.

Eventually, the goal is to make the world listen to you, but first you have to listen really closely to the world around you.

It’s pro golf’s time to listen, and the journey begins on track 1.

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The post Colin Jost’s Ryder Cup TV debut provides a glimpse behind the curtain appeared first on Golf.

The post Colin Jost’s Ryder Cup TV debut provides a glimpse behind the curtain appeared first on Golf.

While the rest of them waited out the rain inside, a single man stood under a makeshift tent at the side of a practice green and mimed his golf swing. One slow, sweeping arc after another. Finally, after a little while, the golfer was interrupted by a voice. He snapped to attention, turning his energy toward the TV set resting on the other side of the makeshift tent. A few feet away, one of the few lingering passersby cut through the sound of rain with a realization.

“Hey! That’s Colin Jost!”

To those outside the tiny bubble of golf media, it was not immediately clear why Jost, the longtime SNL cast member and successor to the Weekend Update throne held by such show legends as Seth Meyers and Norm Macdonald, was standing in the rain at the Ryder Cup.

At a Ryder Cup where the most notable live performer was the lead singer of a prominent Long Island Billy Joel cover band (Mike DelGuidice of Big Shot), Jost’s decision to add a week of TV work seemed trivial. He is, by most common definitions, an A-Lister, married to the actress Scarlett Johansson and participating in the most coveted day job in modern comedy. In addition to SNL stardom, he claims nearly 900,000 Instagram followers, a bestselling book, and an occasional side-gig as the host of Pop Culture Jeopardy.

Why is Colin Jost at the Ryder Cup? The long answer is boring: His pals at Omaha Productions and T-Mobile reached out about hosting an “alternate pregame show” at Bethpage at the intersection of College Gameday and the Manningcast. The show, called T-Mobile Breakfast at Bethpage, would stream on Peacock before each of the three tournament rounds, giving fans a new way to prepare for the Ryder Cup. It would also give Jost the chance to showcase another quiver in a comedy skillset much broader than 30 Rock — a second major sports hosting gig following the 2024 Olympic Surfing competition in Tahiti.

But why is Jost here, in the middle of the Thursday downpour, practicing a swing thought? The shorter answer is much more revealing.

“This is such a minor thing for me, but it’s making sure my club is the first thing moving back, not my hands,” he said later. “I was working with this great PGA teacher, Ivan Foster, and I think he was quoting Bobby Jones. He said, ‘If you ever see someone whose hand moves before the club on the backswing, you should always bet against them.'”

Jost’s dissertation on the nuance of his swing tendencies continues like this for a few more seconds before he pauses and flashes a lightning fast smile.

“I think I’ve already lost the room,” he said.

Yes and no. The truth is that I’m closer to a rocket scientist than a swing instructor, but I did watch Jost and Eli Manning thoroughly dismantle their opponents in a match at the Celebrity Ryder Cup the previous afternoon. And I have seen his distinctive claw grip with a long putter, which is more or less a scarlet letter for the golfingly insane. And I know that golf holds mythical powers over people at his intersection of high-IQ and relentless work ethic. So, yes, he’s lost me in the details, but he’s hooked me on the substance.

Why is he here at Bethpage? Because he loves golf, and because, to someone who loves golf, the chance to hang out at the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black is an offer you don’t refuse. The paycheck, the TV show, the T-Mobile partnership and the chance to forge a name in sports media? That’s all helpful too. But the biggest deal is not that he is Colin Jost, the Weekend Update guy from SNL; it’s that he is Colin Jost, the 8.1 from Rockland Country Club.

There is something deeper than rock and stick that makes Jost love golf. Something that could perhaps be informed by his more than two decades as a writer and a cast member on the SNL staff, surviving the nearly ceaseless grind of a new show, a new host, and a brand-new set of ideas each week. Jost says he has sought wisdom from On Writing, Stephen King’s legendary tome on the craft. He learned from reading that good writing is actually not very complicated.

“There are no short-cuts. You can’t do it part-time. Or whenever you’re in the mood to do it,” he says. “You just have to do it.”

Jost also knows (perhaps a little too well) that good writing bears an inherent humility. Principally, it is about going from a lot to a little.

“Writing is just rewriting,” he said. “Getting things shorter is always making it better.”

Of course, it does not take a genius to recognize this worldview could also be applied rather directly to golf — a sport with lots of humility, few shortcuts, and a mostly perilous path to lower scores. Jost does not make this connection on a rainy Ryder Cup Thursday. Perhaps he hasn’t.

Or perhaps, to the TV star at the center of a practice green at Bethpage Black, it’s just obvious. Nobody winds up at the Ryder Cup by accident. It’s the sort of thing you drop everything to do … even in the pouring rain.

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The post Augusta National, Amazon announce new Masters streaming deal appeared first on Golf.

The post Augusta National, Amazon announce new Masters streaming deal appeared first on Golf.

On Tuesday morning, Amazon and Augusta National announced a deal to bring the Masters to a streaming partner for the first time, tying golf’s largest event to the streaming giant responsible for the NFL’s popular Thursday Night Football package. In following with longstanding club tradition, financial terms of the agreement were not announced.

According to a release, Amazon Prime Video will debut as a “domestic broadcaster of the Masters Tournament” beginning in April 2026, delivering content that will “complement” the club’s outstanding TV deals with ESPN and CBS, the latter of which has televised the Masters for seven decades. Amazon will cover two additional hours of first and second round coverage on Prime Video, from 1-3 p.m. ET, providing a lead-in to ESPN’s coverage on both days. According to the club, additional details about the scope of the Amazon agreement will be announced “prior to the 2026 Masters Tournament.”

“Working alongside Amazon in this capacity is an exciting opportunity for the Masters Tournament and its fans,” Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley said in the release. “We are proud of our longstanding partnerships with CBS Sports and ESPN, who have set the highest standard for broadcast coverage of the Masters. The addition of Amazon will only further our abilities to expand and enhance how the Tournament is presented and enjoyed.”

The announcement marks a major coup for Amazon, giving the big-money streamer arguably the two most elusive broadcast rights agreements in sports between the NFL and Masters. Augusta National chooses new TV partners about as frequently as visits from Haley’s Comet, and it has long been rumored that the club leaves money on the table in its annual agreements with CBS and ESPN in order to showcase the Masters in the best possible light, including limited commercials and lots of buzzy technology.

Amazon, meanwhile, has pursued major sports programming in streaming for the last five years, seeking to pounce on the considerable market opportunity presented by cord-cutting, and its TNF agreement has been largely lauded as a successful trial balloon for sports streaming (though audience sizes have lagged behind traditional linear TV).

“It’s an honor for all of us at Amazon to become a broadcast partner of the Masters Tournament and to provide fans additional hours of live coverage of this treasured event,” Jay Marine, head of Prime Video’s sports department, said. “We are humbled and proud to begin our relationship with Augusta National Golf Club, and we cannot wait to get started.”

Critically, as part of the agreement, CBS will retain streaming rights to both Saturday and Sunday’s lead-in coverage. The network earned plaudits for its handling of two additional hours of lead-in coverage on Paramount+ in 2025, and Paramount’s streaming platform remains a major focus of new owner David Ellison.

On the whole, the news marks the latest expansion of a Masters telecast that has morphed from a two-hour Sunday afternoon affair into one of the sports world’s most accessible TV properties. After decades as one of the world’s most reclusive TV properties (the so-called “first nine” was not televised until the turn the century), Augusta National has shot to the fore of availability, providing new viewing experiences each year. The Amazon partnership complements the work done by the Masters digital team, which allows fans at home to see every shot of tournament play live on any device.

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The post New Golf Channel exec hints at growth opportunities, speaks on USGA deal appeared first on Golf.

The post New Golf Channel exec hints at growth opportunities, speaks on USGA deal appeared first on Golf.

By changing absolutely nothing.

On Tuesday, Golf Channel and its new parent company, Versant, announced it had signed the first rights deal in the nascent cable behemoth’s history, a 6-year agreement with the USGA to keep each of its 15 championships on the same network they’ve called home in some form for the last three decades. The news marked the first major announcement of any kind for Versant, the collection of NBC and Comcast’s cable channels that will be formally “spun off” from the Comcast umbrella later this year.

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The USGA deal is a fitting microcosm of the moment for Versant, keeping a long-time partner with the Golf Channel while simultaneously formalizing the company’s intention to stay the course in cable TV. The announcement cools some outside concern that Versant might look to sell off or dramatically overhaul its collection of cable TV assets in response to the structural upheaval of the cable business in the streaming age. It suggests instead that Versant aims to revitalize its cable assets, doubling down on the declining (but still profitable) enterprise while leveraging the brand strength of its collection of cable channels to look for new investment.

Golf Channel, which will shift to Versant ownership in the new year, is one of the key players in that strategy. In many ways, Versant hopes the “new” Golf Channel will look similar to the old one, continuing to bring live golf tournaments and studio coverage of significance to viewers across the country while supporting supplemental businesses like GolfPass and GolfNow. In order to execute that strategy, Golf Channel needs programming like the USGA, said Matt Hong, Versant’s new president, in an interview with CNBC‘s Alex Sherman.

“We will continue to be active for top-shelf, top-tier sports programming, like the one with the USGA, or like the set of rights with the USGA that we announced today,” Hong said. “That’s our current core business, and we’ll continue to invest in our core business. But we’ll also invest in growth of our digital properties. So, organic growth of digital properties like the ones we have in golf with GolfNow and GolfPass. And then, I think we also have to be assertive about investing inorganically and doing M&A with businesses that are synergistic to our linear properties.”

Corporatespeak aside, Hong’s answer suggests that Versant is armed to make future media investments. One plausible area for those investments is in sports, where Golf Channel, CNBC and USA Network have accumulated some assets, and where there is still real financial upside for linear TV businesses. In recent months, some have suggested that Versant could look to merge with another sports entity to accumulate several more batches of TV rights, chasing one last dragon of sports TV profits from the linear age.

But Hong said for the moment, a merger was out of the picture.

“I don’t know that we will merge with an entity that has sports rights only because we have plenty of programming to help drive our linear business,” Hong said. “I think the future will be acquisitions—inorganic acquisitions, which help diversify our revenue streams. So, it will really be continuing to invest in our core linear business, and then looking for inorganic opportunities that complement that linear business.”

It is generally believed that any long-term succession plan for a cable TV business will be inclusive of streaming, which is where the vast majority of growth in the media has occurred in the last decade. Despite signing the USGA to a TV-only agreement, Hong did not dispute that fact.

“We still believe very much in the strength of the linear networks that we have for the sports division but also for all of Versant inclusive of CNBC. We’re also not blind to the reality of how sports fans consume media,” Hong said. “So even though this [USGA] deal is exclusively linear, we will also have streams that you’ll be able to see on Golfchannel.com early next year, and more to talk about vis-à-vis streaming in the next few years.”

On the topic of streaming, Hong suggested that Versant could look to license some of their best linear TV content to streaming companies. Some partnerships could be inclusive of Versant’s (current) corporate partners at Peacock, but some could come outside of the NBCU umbrella.

“All other things being equal, we’d like to continue to work with and partner with NBCU and Peacock going forward,” Hong said. “I think one of the unique things about being separate public companies here soon is we’ll be able to potentially partner with Peacock, but we’ll also be able to partner with other third-party streamers in situations where a set of rights may or may not work for Peacock but we want them at Versant. We’ll have the freedom to partner with some streamers that previously we didn’t necessarily have the freedom to partner with.”

For Hong, the most valuable word for Versant today is runway. For all the pearl-clutching around the downfall of cable TV, most of Versant’s assets remain financially robust (if declining with the trend of cord-cutting). While Comcast didn’t have the organizational patience to navigate the decline and reposition for the future, Versant remains specialized in cable TV for just that reason.

“I think we have a strong business. We have $7 billion in annual revenue and healthy free cash flow. I also think that the reason why people tune into linear television are assets like those that exist at CNBC,” Hong said. “We’ve got strong news assets, and we’ve got strong sports assets that I’m particularly partial to. And I think that provides us with a runway to look at how we can evolve this business through inorganic growth and I think that will be a focus for our company. For us in the sports division, that will be a focus and I think for that – for our entire company, that will be a focus.”

In other words, the winds of change are blowing at Golf Channel HQ — but in the short-term, it probably won’t look that way.

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The post 5 things to know from the USGA’s new 6-year TV deal with NBC appeared first on Golf.

The post 5 things to know from the USGA’s new 6-year TV deal with NBC appeared first on Golf.

The new deal marks a major development for each of the three parties involved, particularly after NBC and the USGA agreed to let the exclusive negotiating window expire earlier this year, opening the door for a handful of competitors to make serious pitches to the governing body. So, what should you know from the next chapter of this relationship? Let’s break down five things.

5. Staying Together

NBC has been in the driver’s seat to win this USGA rights bid for a couple of months, but this was hardly a sure thing. The USGA had interest from ESPN and, according to Puck, Netflix also made a strong push.

For the USGA, there have always been considerations beyond media rights dollars. The governing body is committed to its initiative to grow the game, and those efforts include showcasing each of its USGA Championships in front of considerable audiences. The decision to stay with NBC reflects the intrinsic audience value that linear TV still provides, and the benefit that familiarity plays in delivering on the USGA’s underlying mission.

Don’t discredit the role collaboration played in the eventual decision to re-sign with the USGA, either. NBC and the USGA worked to cut down TV commercials at the U.S. Open and expand the broadcast window and scope at the U.S. Women’s Open in 2024 and 2025 — to say nothing of providing the USGA with an off-ramp from the fledgling Fox deal in ’20 — and those goodwill gestures were not lost on USGA brass.

4. Fox Finality

There was always some lingering weirdness about the USGA’s last TV deal. While Fox put forth an A-rated telecast, there were concerns about ROI from the second Fox signed the 12-year, $1.1 billion pact in 2013. NBC’s return to the fold in 2020 provided a graceful off-ramp, but the networks brokered a sweetheart deal for NBC to take the final six years of the agreement. That left some awkwardness for NBC and the USGA during the last few years, particularly as NBC worked through some financial considerations of its own as it restructured its broadcast.

For a few months after the exclusive negotiating window expired, some in the industry whispered that the USGA would have to take a significant pay cut on its next TV deal to make up for the Fox morass — a fact that USGA CEO Mike Whan dismissed directly in his U.S. Open state of the state.

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“Obviously, we’re committed to pretty significant investments back into the game, and one of the benefits of that investment is a good TV partner,” Whan said. “But we’re going to look for somebody that can deliver at the levels or better than we’re delivering now, and through that partnership, [a partner who] enables us not just to tell the U.S. Open story or the U.S. Women’s Open story, but some of these incredible amateur stories as well.”

Now, with the previous deal firmly off the books and the USGA’s investment locked up through the beginning of the next decade, each of the parties can move forward with a clean slate.

3. First-Timers

An unusual offshoot of the USGA deal is the role played by Versant, the new cable company recently spun off from Comcast that includes USA Network and Golf Channel. While the structure of the new USGA deal is more or less the same as the previous deal — USA Network and Golf Channel will act as cable subsidiaries for certain USGA events and early-week U.S. Open coverage, just as they did in the past — the deal marked the first major rights agreement for Versant since the company’s formation.

The familiar structure of the new agreement likely greased the skids for the negotiation, but the lawyers for each side were likely very careful to make sure negotiations happened independently and in good faith, lest they run afoul of U.S. antitrust law (regulators pay close attention to companies in the aftermath of spinoffs). In the end, the new deal gives an additional hour to NBC on Thursday and Friday afternoon at the U.S. Open, early-week coverage of the U.S. and U.S. Women’s to USA Network, and Golf Channel the U.S. Senior Open and eight other USGA events.

2. Term Limits

The six-year deal represents a modest shift down in the term of pro golf TV rights contracts, where (generally speaking) networks like longer-term and governing bodies like shorter-term. A lot of that is likely owed to the upheaval in the sports TV business, where TV deals seem to multiply in value every few months. For the USGA, another 12-year agreement might have eaten into their revenue projections if they missed another quantum leap in the value of sports TV rights.

Some of the shift may be owed to the upheaval in the golf business, too. It wasn’t long ago that NBC and CBS signed dual 10-year TV rights agreements in 2020, only to see stars like Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm walk out the door for a competitive product just a handful of years later. With the PGA Tour deal up in 2030, the 6-year pact gives NBC an off-ramp if they need it. Thankfully, there’s no indication that’s the case: Ratings have rebounded on the PGA Tour, and the enthusiasm around the Tour product is at its highest level in years. Still, with an extra dose of caution, it’s easy to see why 6 years felt like a reasonable term.

1. Big Bets

NBC eventually came back around to the U.S. Open for a simple reason: It is the second-biggest tournament in golf, and golf continues to be a worthy investment. The agreement gives NBC a flagship golf event for each of the next six years, and after executive producer Sam Flood’s reset, the network appears to be headed in the right direction.

“We saw what happened when the USGA came back to NBC [after a short-lived stint on FOX] — we saw how the USGA got elevated again to where it belongs as the premier events involved,” Flood told GOLF in June. “That’s what our company’s about, and that’s what our production team does. The business side is, I’m in the fun side of the business. The business guys can do the business, but from a production perspective, we know we make everything we touch better.”

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