About

European Tour Productions is the TV production arm for the PGA European Tour. Although it’s a small business, the team covers more than 40 major golfing tournaments every year, recording the events for several major broadcasters, including Sky and The Golf Channel.

Challenge

To produce the most engaging programming, the team needs to get information from the course back to the studio and the commentary team—often in pretty rough weather conditions. This includes everything from player statistics to up-to-the-second scores and all the action. With 2.35 million viewers watching live across various platforms, they need it instantly—to help commentators deliver the most up-to-date, accurate insights.

With more than 40 events each year, the team moves around a lot—setting up in many locations around the world. That means their devices need to handle the knocks and bumps of being packed up and transported around. With military grade protection built in, Samsung Rugged devices are more than up to the task.

Much of the information comes from sports data company IMG Arena. However, the team supplements it with insights from its own people—‘or spotters’—out and about, watching the action. Armed with Samsung Rugged devices, they can communicate from anywhere on the course. The on-course commentators also carry the same mobile devices, so they can access this information quickly, and use it to inform their commentary. Rather than using traditional radios—which only let them send data by voice—mobile devices let them relay information much faster, and with much greater detail, either via a dedicated on-site Wi-Fi network or mobile data.

Dealing with large amounts of information—especially when it comes from multiple sources—means security is highly important to European Tour Productions.

Solution

They can rest assured that with Samsung Knox, everything captured is encrypted on the device and kept completely secure. 

“Security is key, because obviously there’s a big question about integrity if that data is being used elsewhere. We need to make sure our networks are secure.”

Neil Price, Operations & Technical Manager

Samsung are also on hand to help the company set up their devices so the IT team can update, manage and secure them remotely—ensuring they meet the company’s security policies and without having to disable features for users. The devices also come with three years of enhanced support and, should something go wrong, they’re covered by next business day replacement.

European Tour Productions are impressed with what they’ve achieved so far, giving their people the right tools to gather and share rich data in some pretty harsh environments. And they see great potential for using Samsung Rugged devices in new and different ways.