Underneath all of Augusta National’s green jacket pretense lies a funny truth.
There is no televised event in golf — and maybe no televised event in professional sports — that is as accessible as the Masters. While the tournament basks in its well-earned aura of exclusivity, consuming the Masters is approaching PBS levels of convenience. While the tournament has traditionally aired for only nine weekend hours on CBS (a pittance by PGA Tour standards), cameras capture every painstaking second of tournament week for coverage that airs over the Masters’ suite of free-to-use digital and mobile apps.
This is why, perhaps, the golf public only offers only tepid criticism of the Masters’ comparatively restrictive TV window every year. Sure, it’d be nice to watch more of the Masters on CBS, but it’s not like it’s all that hard to watch the action basically anywhere else.
Thankfully, even the loudest critics will have one fewer thing to complain about in 2025. On Tuesday, Augusta National and CBS announced an additional five hours of TV coverage from golf’s first major in the new year, including an additional hour of weekend television coverage during the network’s Saturday afternoon window.
The primary piece of the expansion comes on Saturday on CBS, which will now air coverage from 2-7 p.m. ET on both weekend days, expanding the total number of televised hours on the network to 10. The network will also pick up an additional two hours of streaming coverage on Paramount Plus before the start of CBS’s coverage on Saturday and Sunday.
The news gives the Masters its broadest television schedule ever, the latest development in what has been a decades-long march of television growth for the famously reclusive club. Just three decades ago, television viewers had never so much as seen Augusta National’s famed “first nine” — now, in what has become almost routine, they have been conditioned to expect wall-to-wall coverage across a host of networks, mediums and days … with limited commercial interruptions.
The steady growth of Augusta National’s entertainment offerings has gone on behind the scenes for years, but now golf fans have no reason to look away. The Masters App is considered by many within the sports biz to be the industry standard as an entertainment offering, and in 2024 the club even released the first-ever iteration of the Masters VR App, for use with the Apple Vision Pro headset.
In a vacuum, these changes mean very little, but on the whole they speak to something bigger for the Masters on TV — an effort at bringing those closer to golf’s biggest event than ever before.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting the six months ’till we see them in action.
