Jim Nantz could have an additional hour on the air throughout CBS’s protection from the 2025 Masters.
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Beneath all of Augusta Nationwide’s inexperienced jacket pretense lies a humorous reality.
There is no such thing as a televised occasion in golf — and possibly no televised occasion in skilled sports activities — that’s as accessible because the Masters. Whereas the match basks in its well-earned aura of exclusivity, consuming the Masters is approaching PBS ranges of comfort. Whereas the match has historically aired for less than 9 weekend hours on CBS (a pittance by PGA Tour requirements), cameras seize each painstaking second of match week for protection that airs over the Masters’ suite of free-to-use digital and cellular apps.
This is the reason, maybe, the golf public solely gives solely tepid criticism of the Masters’ comparatively restrictive TV window yearly. Certain, it’d be good to observe extra of the Masters on CBS, but it surely’s not prefer it’s all that tough to observe the motion principally anyplace else.
Fortunately, even the loudest critics could have one fewer factor to complain about in 2025. On Tuesday, Augusta Nationwide and CBS introduced an extra 5 hours of TV protection from golf’s first main within the new 12 months, together with an extra hour of weekend tv protection in the course of the community’s Saturday afternoon window.
The first piece of the growth comes on Saturday on CBS, which can now air protection from 2-7 p.m. ET on each weekend days, increasing the whole variety of televised hours on the community to 10. The community may even choose up an extra two hours of streaming protection on Paramount Plus earlier than the beginning of CBS’s protection on Saturday and Sunday.
The information offers the Masters its broadest tv schedule ever, the most recent growth in what has been a decades-long march of tv development for the famously reclusive membership. Simply three many years in the past, tv viewers had by no means a lot as seen Augusta Nationwide’s famed “first 9” — now, in what has turn into nearly routine, they’ve been conditioned to count on wall-to-wall protection throughout a number of networks, mediums and days … with restricted business interruptions.
The regular development of Augusta Nationwide’s leisure choices has gone on behind the scenes for years, however now golf followers haven’t any cause to look away. The Masters App is taken into account by many inside the sports activities biz to be the trade normal as an leisure providing, and in 2024 the membership even launched the first-ever iteration of the Masters VR App, to be used with the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional headset.
In a vacuum, these modifications imply little or no, however on the entire they converse to one thing larger for the Masters on TV — an effort at bringing these nearer to golf’s largest occasion than ever earlier than.
Now it’s only a matter of ready the six months ’until we see them in motion.
