You know what they say: If you don’t like the business at one of golf’s major TV partners, just wait five minutes.
Of course, we’re speaking (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek. The golf TV business has not just been one of the most stable environments in sports over the last decade, its network partners have also been some of the most stable businesses in sports. The PGA Tour’s partners at CBS, NBC, ESPN and Golf Channel have experienced change over the last few decades, but in the great cauldron of the media business, they have been the picture of consistency — operating businesses under mostly stable ownership, to mostly stable profit margins, with mostly stable long-term results.
Until the summer of 2025. As the dust settled on the final major championship of the 2025 golf season, the scuttlebutt was only beginning on a handful of the biggest moves for golf’s TV partners in the last decade. One by one, each of golf’s major partners quietly laid out the parameters for a major shift in their way of business or life (with the notable exception of LIV’s partners at Fox Sports, whose turn-of-heel deal with Barstool Sports I would term neither “quiet” nor “major” in the broader scheme of their business.)
With the golf season dwindling and the FedEx Cup Playoffs still waiting on the horizon, let’s tick through each of those partners and explain a little bit more about the changes afoot, starting with the most high-profile shift of the bunch: CBS.
4 golf TV networks undergoing major changes in 2025
1. CBS
If you are a fan of certain late-night television comedy shows, you might have heard about the biggest change coming to CBS and its parent network, Paramount. Following a 2-1 vote from the Federal Trade Commission last Thursday (and many months of salacious headlines about negotiations between owner Shari Redstone and the White House), Paramount and CBS were officially acquired by Skydance, the movie-and-TV production empire owned by David Ellison (the son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison).
Skydance paid $8 billion in the acquisition, and Ellison spoke on a call with investors afterward about molding CBS and Paramount to serve as an engine for the modern media ecosystem — combining Skydance’s success as a tech-forward production house with Paramount’s storied intellectual property and CBS’s massive national reach. Practically, the acquisition makes Skydance better equipped to compete with deep-pocketed streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon, who have taken advantage of tremendous amounts of cash and much deeper technical knowhow to leapfrog traditional media companies in the race into streaming.
To understand why Skydance purchased CBS and Paramount, you need to understand the battlefield the streaming wars are currently being fought upon.
- In one corner you have Netflix, the belle of the ball, churning out more money and more content on a better tech stack than any media company ever. Netflix has more subscribers than most of the remaining streamers combined, and every time Ted Sarandos sneezes it adds a few billion-dollars to its market-cap. But how does Netflix utilize that insane advantage? With thousands of micro-targeted singles but few, if any, broad-appeal home runs. In other words, Netflix is trying to win the war not with the Atom Bomb, but with Napalm.
- In another corner you have the rest of new-Tech: your Apples and Amazons, who spend nearly as much on a tech stack nearly as good as Netflix’s, but who have found delivering blockbusters can’t be gamed or algorithm’d into existence. They have hit singles and home runs … but also recorded a ton of whiffs. In other words, their bombs are effective, but they still haven’t learned GPS.
- And then, in the trenches, you have your old-Hollywood barrons: your Peacocks and HBOs and — yes — your Paramounts, who have spent fortunes building generally horrendous tech, but have the institutional knowhow and intellectual property to make their content hit for average and for power. This group, the old guard, have gotten walloped as streaming has shifted from Hollywood to Tech, so much so that they have routinely resorted to selling their own hit content (The Office, Suits, etc.) to the Tech streamers just to lose less money in streaming — a practice that has contributed to the old guard losing more money in streaming in the long run. These guys are dropping big bombs and small ones, but they’re still figuring out how to avoid blowing up their own planes while they do it.
If you are a pessimist, you believe the old guard is headed for the wood chipper once Tech is done optimizing their every bureaucratic bloat and inefficiency. If you’re an optimist, you believe the old guard still has a chance to compete (if not win) in the streaming wars … if it can be transformed to maintain its great strength for creative content while losing its great liability for horrendous tech and boneheaded operational decisions.
By now you might have figured out that David Ellison of Skydance is an optimist. By purchasing Paramount and CBS, Ellison is betting he can use his tech background to leverage Paramount’s IP and CBS’s audiences and create a real streaming competitor existing between old-Hollywood and new-Tech. It’s a bold bet — and a considerable organizational change for old-Hollywood CBS — but it reflects Ellison’s core optimism about the role CBS can play in the future of media, with CBS Sports at the center of the puzzle.
All of that is a long way of saying that CBS Sports remains a critically important piece of the larger Skydance business. The value of the CBS Sports name, both as a moneymaker and an audience-generator, will be critically important to Skydance’s efforts at transforming the business while maintaining the strength of the audience. If Skydance can take advantage of CBS Sports’ built-in balance sheet benefits while pushing the Sports department’s massive audiences towards streaming and new content, they can have their cake and eat it too.
It’s a big bet, but make no mistake, CBS’s Golf properties are at the center of it. Without sports, the whole calculus shifts.
NEWSLETTER
Sign up for GOLF’s Hot Mic Newsletter!
Want exclusive golf media news in your inbox? Sign up for the Hot Mic Newsletter with James Colgan!
SIGN UP
2. Golf Channel
Many saw the writing on the wall when Comcast announced the creation of a new spinoff company — later named Versant — that would take the vast majority of its dwindling-but-still-profitable cable assets. Comcast/NBC might like Golf Channel — hell, they might love Golf Channel — but now it was time for Golf Channel to move on.
For Comcast/NBC, the decision was strategic: cable TV is slowly dying, and it made sense for Comcast to spin off its cable assets while those assets were still profitable. For Golf Channel, the decision was a rare win-win: Comcast/NBC was much too big to spend much time thoughtfully modernizing and transitioning a small cable channel like Golf Channel for the streaming age. Now, while Golf Channel still drew big profits and PGA Tour audiences, the network could utilize the strength of its business to position for the future (under a new, pretty corporate monolith).
Now, as the golf season turns to fall, that transition is well underway, with Versant’s company logo even appearing on Rory McIlroy’s golf bag during the Open Championship at Royal Portrush. Golf Channel will maintain much of the same look and talent as before, and its new parent-company will be headed by a familiar face, too: golf-lover (and longtime NBC Sports exec) Mark Lazarus.
It’s hard to say exactly how the strategy might change for Golf Channel under new ownership. (Could it pivot to running a hybrid-digital/broadcast business, taking advantage of its Tour broadcast rights to double down on short-form video content? Could it pivot back to something resembling Golf Channel’s more traditional broadcast business in the days before the move to Stamford?) Still, the company is already enjoying flexing its new muscles in the golf world, with longtime golf exec Tom Knapp and new LPGA commissioner Craig Kessler working to bring Lottie Woad’s first LPGA win on CNBC in an impromptu fashion on Sunday afternoon.
These are the kind of efficiencies Versant can focus on now with a clear head, and with Woad on Sunday, golf fans emerged the clear winners.
3. NBC
The other half of this incredibly amicable break-up, NBC, has questions of its own to consider in the world after Golf Channel. For one thing, according to a report last week the Wall Street Journal, NBC could be looking to start up in the cable channel world again, restarting the NBC Sports Network (or something like it) in pursuit of a place between NBC and Peacock to house its many hours of live sports coverage.
For NBC, the decision would have major short-term upside, giving a new option for cable bundlers inclusive of the network’s NBA, Olympics, Indycar, horse-racing and golf rights, while protecting the downside of the network losing money on sports should Peacock’s growth not arrive fast enough. From where I sit, it strikes me as a no-brainer decision to groove a fastball to folks still grappling with a shift to streaming. Peacock will always be there when the cable days are finished.
4. ESPN
ESPN announced the creation of a new platform it is calling “ESPN” earlier this summer. This was, to grizzled media reporters burned out by streamer names like “Oonu” and “Goober,” much appreciated. It was also deeply intentional.
The “new” ESPN, a direct-to-consumer, $30-per-month subscription, represents ESPN’s bet for the future. It is an all-encompassing offering fans can purchase to get ESPN and only ESPN and all of ESPN, whenever they want it.
The goal for the network is to attract cord-cutters who still love live sports but who aren’t interested in buying a cable package to watch them. With the ESPN DTC app, those fans can get everything a normal viewer would receive with their cable bill at roughly half the price. Streaming options, like those available on ESPN+, will be included in the new offering, giving fans the opportunity to watch, say, 100 hours of PGA Tour Live in the same app they’re consuming ESPN’s college football broadcasts and in between commercials on ESPN’s studio shows.
For ESPN, the DTC platform is a chance to view into a world after cable TV. And while $30/month might sound steep, for sports buffs who have already cut the cord, it might represent the perfect kind of bargain. There’s only one way to find out.
