Every spring, golf fans get excited for two things: to watch the world’s best golfers tee off at the all-important Augusta National Masters tournament, and to download the companion app.
We’re serious. For some reason (probably relating to how much money the notoriously secretive Augusta golf club has), the free companion app for the Masters tournament is incredible. When the Masters roll around, people post odes to it on Reddit, giving the app shout-outs purely to show their appreciation.
“Just a reminder that the Masters App is a rare beast that is actually brilliant, well designed and works fantastically well,” a Thursday post in r/Golf reads. The tournament began Thursday and runs through the weekend.
To be clear, this isn’t a PGA app, or an ESPN or Golf Channel app. Nope. It’s an app that’s only purpose is to help people watch one golf tournament one weekend a year.
Is The Masters app free?
So what makes the app so great?
First of all, it’s 100 percent free. There’s no cable login or subscription service required. That’s an absolute rarity in a streaming ecosystem in which broadcasters’ number one goal is getting people to pay for content. You can download the Masters app in the Apple App Store for iPhones or Google Play store for Android phones.
But content-wise, frankly, it just has everything that someone who wants to watch a heck of a lot of high-level golf would want. A leaderboard with up-to-the-minute scoring? Check. A livestream of the broadcast that isn’t buggy? Naturally. A latest news tab, a schedule, a map of the course, highlight videos, a birds-eye-view showing the location of every player? But of course.
But the feature that really pushes this baby over the edge is its “Every Player, Every Shot, Every Hole” feature. The Masters has taken it upon itself to film and broadcast, um, every shot of every player at each hole.
Who would need to see this much golf, you ask? Golf fans. What on earth do you do with this much video? Well, in 2020, the app rolled out a feature called My Group that lets you make your own lil’ custom group to keep an eye on any player you want to. There’s a tab where you can keep track of their scores, and a feed that shows their shots.
So, for example, if I was to make my own group of golf cuties, I would choose Colin Morikawa, Jordan Spieth, and Viktor Hovland. Then, thanks to the app, I’d get to just watch my favorite boiz being cute and good at golf together while getting to ignore the borings that might be featured in the main live broadcast.
Or, as one Reddit user put it, “Best of all, every player every shot coverage means that I won’t be forced into watching Patrick Reed.”
Give them all the green jacket.Credit: Screenshot: The Masters
Once my boiz take the green, the feeds of their shots will show up in the “My Group” tab.
Credit: Screenshot: The Masters
The illuminati at the Augusta Country Club didn’t come up with this app on their own, obviously. The club partners with IBM to make the app. They upped their AI game with the “Every Shot” feature in 2020 so people could more effectively watch remotely during the pandemic year. The app relies on IBM’s Watson AI to manage all that player data and video, to automatically surface highlights, track shots, and more.
The app gets fun new toys every year, too. According to the app’s version history, what’s new in the 2022 Master’s App is improvements to the fantasy integration, and more content around “Featured Groups+.” This is a portal that shows featured groups of players that now displays live video plus “bonus trivia, polls, predictions, breaking news, and more.”
If it sounds like a lot of time, money, effort, and technology has gone into making an app that people use once a year for the purpose of watching a sporting event, correct! But when watching sports can be so buggy and fragmented thanks to streaming services, sometimes you just have to give a shoutout when an app works really, really well.
Here’s looking at you, kid.