In April 2020, following the difficult decision to cancel The Open for the first time since World War II, The R&A embarked on an ambitious project to mark 2020 Open week with a highly entertaining and innovative golf broadcast.
The Open For The Ages mixed footage and audio from five decades of archives, with the winner decided by combining over 10,000 fan votes with player career statistics.
The project was highly complex: hundreds of research hours, a thousand hour’s editing, digital enhancements – including changing branding and removing players from key scenes – and all done remotely.
The result was a three-hour final round “live” broadcast, shown in more than 50 countries and available on TheOpen.com, YouTube and Facebook. The programme was watched by two million people and complemented with an extensive second-screen experience that included a bespoke branded app, ‘in-play clips’ on social media, live leaderboards, and highlights shows.
