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A first look at the PGA Tour’s new ‘smart tracer’ technology.
PGA Tour | Golf Channel
PGA Tour broadcasts just turned a different color.
On Thursday at the RBC Canadian Open, the Tour debuted a brand-new shot tracer on its telecasts it is calling “smart tracer” — an on-screen graphic that changes in color while shots are in the air based upon the ball’s most likely outcome.
The smart tracer will serve as an addition to the Tour’s popular “drone tracer” technology, which tracks shots in the air utilizing a moving drone camera. The drone tracer is fresh off an Emmy victory, and you can think of the smart tracer as an enhancement to the preexisting tech rather than a replacement for it, giving a viewers a deeper glimpse into the outcome of shots as they are unfolding in real-time.
The Tour’s broadcast partners — CBS, NBC and Golf Channel — have experimented increasingly with probability-based visual graphics in recent years, leaning into the Tour’s AWS partnership and the expansion of artificial intelligence to chart probabilities down to the hundred-millisecond.
In previous iterations of the technology, viewers have witnessed a shrinking “landing area” graphic as the ball has closed in on its destination. The smart tracer will differ from these prior experiments by providing colors associated with a shot’s outcome: green for a shot in the fairway, red for not in the fairway, and blue before a probability can be determined. According to the Tour, the new tracer will start populating roughly 1.2 seconds after impact, and will be updated every hundred milliseconds until the ball has landed. You can check out a video of it in action below.
Some viewers have argued against these enhancements, arguing they remove some of the anticipation between shot-and-outcome that makes for compelling golf viewing. Tracer technology, however, has been one of the most ubiquitously appreciated developments in the last two decades of golf on TV — coloring in everything from Rory McIlroy’s unthinkable wedge into the water on the 13th at the Masters to McIlroy’s equally unthinkable iron shot into the 15th green to set up a grand-slam-altering birdie.
The Tour says the new tracers come as part of the rollout surrounding its Fan Forward Initiative, a massive survey of golf fans that has helped to inform many of the tweaks surrounding telecasts and fan experience in 2025. In addition to the smart tracer, Tour telecasts have experimented with cutline-oriented Friday broadcasts, alternative shot-sequences and fewer tap-in putts.
The smart tracer tech will be utilized throughout the weekend at the RBC Canadian Open and in a handful of Tour events for the remainder of the season: the Rocket Classic, Travelers Championship and each of the FedEx Cup Playoff events.
