SBJ Tech: Inside GoVision’s biggest LED screen rollout ever for Ryder Cup

I use this space today to honor an incredible man.

I got to know Shawn Clark when I was the Appalachian State beat reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal and he was an assistant with the program. He would later become the head coach of our alma mater, as well as a friend. He passed this weekend following a medical episode from earlier in the month, and I (along with so many others) are gutted. Thank you to the Charlotte Observer and Executive Sports Editor Lydia Craver for giving me a space to write about him.

Love you, Shawn.

Brett Amman had been hard at work on a golf course -- and not just any golf course.

GoVision’s SVP for its golf vertical had been walking and building around Bethpage Black when we connected earlier this month, prepping LED screens aplenty as the focus of the golf world shifts there for this week’s Ryder Cup.

Amman at that point had a crew of over 20 on-site -- he, meanwhile, had been there since Sept. 3 -- working to set up what is likely the single-largest temporary LED deployment in North American history. It’s an ideal place to do it, too, Amman said. “The property lends itself very well to a huge build,” he told me. “... You have a lot of wide-open spaces, a lot of holes that interact with each other, have tee boxes and greens next to each other.”

Conceptualizing the sheer number of screens prompted a full-circle realization for GoVision Chairman and Founder Chris Curtis, who joked that in a previous life (also known as 1995, when he was building up another company called Screenworks), he believes he put up the first screen at a Ryder Cup, a single mobile unit at a tee box. “I was reflecting today that we came a long way,” Curtis said.

This is the fourth Ryder Cup for GoVision, a stretch that encompasses every U.S.-hosted version of the competition since 2012. That first tournament featured eight LED screens, Amman recalled. GoVision’s growing presence has increased with the PGA of America’s push to engage fans on-site while preserving the heritage of the game, GoVision CEO Kevin Faciane added.

“You don’t want the video boards to take away from that, and they don’t,” Faciane said. “I think where we’ve placed these things and where the PGA folks want them are just naturally integrated into the beauty of the course.”

Previous practice

With big deployments throughout sports -- Final Fours, the Super Bowl, ESPN’s “College GameDay” and the New York City Marathon -- GoVision has gathered plenty of experience in determining the right team and inventory needed for something like the Ryder Cup.

The screens will be used for various purposes, mainly to convey the on-course action. But the production requires attentive programming to meet fan consumption needs while not interfering with the golf (as in a replay blasting on screens while a golfer is lining up a putt). GoVision uses camera monitoring systems for the on-course screens so that it can switch to static content if live play is near an LED’s location.

With so much still to build at the time, Amman was eager to see how this GoVision setup would meet the complex needs of the Ryder Cup. When play starts Friday, they’ll have 27 LED screens to show all the prep work done since the 43rd Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits in 2021.

“Every three years, people are looking for new ways to upgrade, and it naturally allowed us to just start doing larger tournaments and being more efficient through them,” Amman said.

Across all the digital experiences for the Ryder Cup platforms (app, website, etc.), Capgemini’s Outcome IQ will attempt to enhance the fan experience by providing competition probabilities to pinpoint those pivotal moments in play that might result in victories for Team USA or Team Europe.

The feature first rolled out at the 2023 Ryder Cup in Italy, but its debut on U.S. soil will come with significant upgrades. Outcome IQ can provide an instant snapshot of win probability for how a match may be trending. It can also try to forecast potential situations in pairings, leaning on historical data for players from their last 50 tournaments and accounting for the traits of each specific hole.

“It’s providing probabilities, but on top of that, it’s bringing all the possibilities you can get through AI,” said Pascal Brier, chief innovation officer and member of the Group Executive Committee at Capgemini.

Brier mentions that often, sifting through mounds of data is the predominant benefit when talking about AI. For the Ryder Cup, he contends it’s the speed. Ryder Cup teams aren’t announced until roughly a month ahead of the event. You don’t know the pairings until the day before. A stroke must be taken before a fresh probability can be generated. That leaves Capgemini a two-second turnaround from when the ball stops rolling to update a massive set of 170 million possibilities due to the match-play format.

Outcome IQ came from a general goal to boost the fan experience for all sports fans. Capgemini is a worldwide partner for the Ryder Cup. In the U.S., it was the global partner of the 37th America’s Cup and, worldwide, the official technology partner of the Tour de France. Brier said that internal studies showed that fans across all demographics craved the insights that helped make sense of past performances, whether that was looking back historically or analyzing play from earlier in the day.

“Before and after the game, 70% of sports fan want more data,” Brier said. “They want to understand what did they do in the past? How did that team behave? What’s the probability of winning against that one, and things like that.”

On top of providing the info to fans, Brier said the analysis will also be featured by broadcasters to contextualize the typical drama of a USA-Europe tilt.

And to be extra sure, Brier said that Capgemini has pressure-tested the tool using the past. When this next generation of Outcome IQ digested the 2023 Ryder Cup data sets, Brier added that the technology correctly identified 30 pivotal moments in the competition that resulted in a victory for Team Europe. It’s why he’s looking forward to seeing those moments pinpointed at the relevant wheres and whens to truly meet the fan in their live-processing curiosity.

But he also makes a point to say that probabilities aren’t locked in by divinity, and that’s ultimately the reason for tuning in to watch in the first place.

“The tool is of service,” Brier said, “but the hero is the game.”

• SBJ’s Joe Lemire reports that the Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) will be coming to MLB in 2026.
• My colleague Rob Schaefer broke down Literate AI and its attempt to provide the sports industry greater online visibility through AI optimization. You can read the story from this week’s magazine here.
• St. Louis’ Enterprise Center received a major Wi-Fi refresh from Verizon Business, my colleague Bret McCormick writes.
• Lemire also reports that Ekkobar, which uses AI to derive insights from social media, released a new sponsorship-matching product called MIRA to help athletes find NIL deals.
• Schaefer also reports that Aescape brought on retired NFL legend and Fox Sports analyst Tom Brady (also a Raiders minority owner) in the newly created role of chief innovation officer.