Suggestions to DGN from an Enthusiastic Viewer: An Open Letter
The end of the season is always a time for looking backward. Awards are given, players’ individual seasons are assessed, and superlatives are identified. As a proud pro disc golf nerd, I love all of this stuff (except the awards, but that’s another topic). I love browsing the PDGA website and seeing who made how much in winnings, what their average payout per tournament was, what was their average place in Pro Tour events, and so on. Looking backward inevitably leads to looking forward. Taking what we learned from this season and using it to inform how next season goes. With this article I want to specifically go over some suggestions that I have to further improve Disc Golf Network and all of its content.
Firstly, I want to say that I love DGN. I think that for the overall size of disc golf as an industry, the amount of broadcasting infrastructure DGN works with, and the price of a subscription, DGN delivers an extremely high-quality product. DGN is the subject of a lot of ridicule in online discussion, but I think most people who bash DGN are self-absorbed morons who get a lot of pleasure from complaining about as many things as possible as often as possible. I just want to make it clear that these are not just complaints, but truly suggestions and constructive criticisms.
Most of my suggestions pertain to the auxiliary content that goes along with actual tournament coverage. I am glad that disc golf is taking a cue from other mainstream sports and producing content adjacent to Pro Tour events such as press conferences, pre- and post-round interviews, highlight reels, and pre- and post-round analysis shows like Tournament Central. The actual content within these items is already very good for the most part, but I think that the formatting could use some work. Here are the biggest things:
#1: Chop up the press conferences into individual interviews. This just seems like a no brainer to me and, while I don’t really have any editing experience, I can’t imagine this would be a laborious editing task. It is just such a pain to have to sift through a single 2 hour video just to find the players whose interviews I want to hear. It would be so much better to simply have a folder on the DGN interface labeled “Press Conference” and then within that folder, all of the individual portions of the presser. It just seems lazy to slap up a massive multi-hour video and then expect people to watch the whole thing. Then there is the huge stretches of downtime between interviews. Multiple minutes of screensaver and background music between interviews. Why??? Just edit this out!! It certainly deters me from watching. Another part of this that I don’t understand is that my suggestion is already done to some degree for social media! I love seeing the brief clips from interviews that DGPT posts in the days leading up to an event. Seeing these clips makes me want to go and watch the full interview, which is exactly what they’re meant to do! But if I want to do so I have to scan through a huge video and hope I can find what I want.
#2: Isolate post round interviews from the entire live broadcast. This is a very similar gripe to #1, so I won’t go on and on about it. Often times, I want to hear what a player has to say in their immediate post round interview after they have won an event. You want to see it? It’s easy, just click on the 5 hour long live broadcast and fast forward aaaaaaaall the way to the end and you can watch it! It just seems so easy to simply snip this out of the larger video and post it by itself on DGN. People want to watch this content, they just don’t want to have to dig for it.
#3: Having PIP during interviews would be awesome. Now, I will temper this suggestion by saying that I know this is a much taller order than my previous suggestions. Implementing this would take a lot more time and effort than simply chopping up the press conference, but I still think it is a good idea and something that would be worth doing in the future. While I was watching the presser for USDGC, almost every interviewee made multiple references to specific holes on the course. Now, I have been following pro disc golf for a long time, and I have watched many USDGCs, but I still don’t know every hole of Wintrhop Gold off the top of my head. Not to mention the fact that there are minor changes pretty much every year. The players would talk in depth about opinions and strategy for particular holes and it was all meaningless because I had no idea what hole they were talking about. Showing a PIP of (or just cutting to) at least the hole layout, or better yet, footage of the hole, would make these interviews so much more enjoyable. Otherwise it’s just them going on and on about “hole 8.” Is it a par 3? Is there OB? Is it uphill? Without seeing the hole, the viewer really has no context for what they are saying. I know that implementing this change would be especially difficult for immediate post round interviews since they are live and DGN staff would have to splice in various footage in real time, but other sports manage to do it (I think?)! I think that DGN could make it happen sometime soon.
#5: More consistency with who is commentating would be nice. This is a pretty small thing. As much as anything, I just want to know what the rhyme or reason is for who commentates when. Sometimes it’s Ian and Philo. Sometimes it’s Philo and Nate Doss. Sometimes it’s Doss, Sexton, and Philo. And the combinations go on. Again, this isn’t really that big of a deal, but I just don’t understand why there isn’t more consistency.
#6: Keep up the off-season content! I absolutely love stuff like The Wind Read, On Tour, and Off Season with StatMando. Please please please keep this content coming and get more of it! I burned through The Wind Read (my favorite) in a couple of sittings, and then I was sad I didn’t have any more! This really isn’t a criticism, just a voicing of what I want to see!
That’s pretty much it in terms of tangible changes I would like to see to DGN content. Honestly I will probably treat this article like an open letter and add to it as I think of more things. If you have suggestions for how to improve DGN, leave a comment! I think people far too often take for granted that large companies somehow magically know what their audiences want, and often times that is simply not true. They are not going to know unless we tell them. So leave a comment and instead of just complaining on reddit or something, make a constructive suggestion for how DGN can improve.
