PGA Tour’s New TV Deal Indicates Value of Sports Rights Continues to Grow

Golf’s current deal runs through 2021, but the tour wanted to secure an agreement sooner than that in the rapidly evolving TV and streaming landscape. In another sign that the value of sports media rights is still growing rapidly, the PGA Tour is expected on Monday to announce a lucrative new media rights agreement through 2030. Golf tournaments will remain on CBS, NBC and the Golf Channel — where they have been shown since the mid-2000s — while ESPN will show ancillary content on ESPN+, its digital streaming service. While none of the parties would comment on the value of the agreement, four people familiar with the negotiations said the media companies would pay at least a 60 percent increase, even as golf’s biggest star and driver of ratings, Tiger Woods, nears the end of his career.

The current agreement runs through 2021, and is estimated to pay the PGA Tour $400 million annually. With tens of billions of dollars of sports media rights agreements expiring over the next few years, the PGA Tour purposefully began negotiations more than two years before its contracts were set to expire. “We wanted to be out in front of everybody,” said Rick Anderson, the chief media officer of the PGA Tour. “Everyone who can go early in the sports marketplace is going to try to do that.

” While media executives continue to have a nearly insatiable appetite for live sports, television, cable, the internet and digital media are changing so fast that the PGA Tour did not want to take a chance on how things would look in 2022, Anderson said. “This marketplace, consumption habits and platforms, is changing so rapidly that you can’t really make any assumptions about pace of change,” he added. One of the bigger unknowns in sports broadcasting is CBS’s strategy, and its future. CBS recently merged with Viacom and replaced its chief executive.

Its stock has been tumbling since a poor earnings report two weeks ago, and the new ViacomCBS is much smaller than its competitors like NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, and ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. It has also lost one of its most profitable sports rights properties. In December, CBS said it pulled out of rights negotiations for the Southeastern Conference’s game of the week in football, which will go to Disney beginning in 2023.