Apple iPhone owners with a passion for the PGA will have their dreams fulfilled by Turner Sports this weekend. A $1.99 iPhone app for the PGA Championship will provide not only leaderboards but also live video of marquee groups and par-three holes on all four days and instant alerts on their favorite players (complete with cheers for birdies and pars and groans for bogies).

The dog days of summer may still be upon us, but, for Fox Sports, football season is nearly in full swing. The NFL’s preseason offers a testing ground for broadcasters to try out new personnel groupings and technology updates, as well as the opportunity to get comfortable in new venues. Broadcasting the first network game from the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium on Aug. 21, Fox Sports has the challenge of breaking in the facility — and the luxury of beginning its 2011 Super Bowl scouting early.

Nowhere has the classic faceoff between audio and video played out more viscerally than in remote-production vehicles. However, 5.1 surround has contributed greatly to a rough parity in terms of respect, if not in terms of real estate. Part of the reason audio packs a bigger punch in the same amount of space is largely due to the shift to digital consoles in general and the increasingly simpler interfacing between consoles’ audio routers and trucks’ video routers.

For sports fans looking for HD-quality events delivered over the Internet, Swarmcast suggests they take the Autobahn.

Last weekend’s Summer X Games 15 was the franchise’s biggest yet, with four days of events spread over L.A.’s Staples Center and Home Depot Center indoor venues, as well as a skatepark/street course. Kevin Cleary, senior technical audio producer for ESPN’s broadcast, declares it the best-sounding one as well. That’s due in large part, he says, to the granular level of access that ESPN, which also produces the event, offers audio.

The Hazeltine National Golf Club is not the most challenging course for broadcasters, so CBS Sports will focus all of its energy on the storylines during this weekend’s PGA Championship. The “Tiger Effect” should be felt in full force at golf’s final major of the year, and as president of CBS News and Sports Sean McManus explains, the network will not add anything extraneous to detract from the on-course action. In this week’s SVG Audible, McManus and vice president of production Harold Bryant discuss the philosophy behind CBS’ golf coverage, and what fans can expect to see on the exceptionally long links in Chaska, Minnesota.

Online traffic for Turner Sports’ golf sites — PGATour.com, PGA.com, and Yahoo! Sports — averaged 4.1 million unique users over the first six months of 2009, according to Nielsen. Those numbers led the online golf marketplace every month, during which time Turner Sports’ sites averaged more than twice the number of monthly uniques of the nearest competitor.

Hosting an Olympics often leaves an iconic building. Even Olympic Stadium in Montreal — for good or bad — remains a reminder of the 1976 Summer Games. But, for the Vancouver Games, which open in six months, the closest thing to an Olympic legacy might be the Richmond Oval speedskating facility. The building is less than 10 miles (16 km) outside downtown and will be converted to a recreation complex after the Olympics.

Ross Video announced that its CrossOver 16 HD/standard-definition production switchers, announced at NAB, are now in full production and shipping to customers.

Several third-party developers will work with Ross Video on its openGear terminal equipment platform, designing products based on openGear for partners and customers, the company announced.

Thorsten Schulze joined Riedel Communications as product manager for multimedia and entertainment on its RockNet team, where he will manage the existing and future RockNet portfolio and its integration with Riedel’s MediorNet fiber-based signal-transport technology.

Signiant will demonstrate the latest version of its Content Distribution Management software, CDM v8.2, at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam Sept. 11-15, as well as announcing several new members of the Signiant Integration Product Program, which enables third-party technology providers to integrate components such as watermarking systems, transcoders, and quality-control applications into CDM’s open architecture.

EVS Broadcast Equipment said its XT[2] and XS production servers now natively support Panasonic’s DVCPRO HD and DVCPRO50 codecs. The support ranges across the company’s entire functional product line, including its IPDirector (the software player and its new timeline editor, IPEdit), SpotBox, MulticamLSM, CleanEdit, XFile, and Insio, its latest multicamera ingest software for studio.

ViewCast debuted a streaming-media appliance that supports H.264 streaming via the Adobe Flash platform, saying its Niagara 2120 “provides professional-quality performance and reliability for organizations in corporate, government, education, worship, and athletic settings seeking a plug-and-play platform for streaming video content across enterprise networks or over the Internet.”

Korea Telecom’s HD Internet-protocol-TV service, QOOK TV (formerly MegaTV), will use Linear Acoustic’s advanced loudness-management and monitoring technology to deliver its IPTV services in South Korea.

Following up on its agreement to allow Cablevision Systems Optimum Online high-speed-Internet subscribers to stream New York Yankees Major League Baseball games, Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network finalized a similar arrangement with Verizon Communications, and eligible FiOS TV and broadband subscribers will be able to stream Yankees games beginning with Friday night’s visit by the ball club to the Seattle Mariners.

TV- and radio-station operator Max Media expanded its HD centralcasting system in Missoula, MT, on the back of a Utah Scientific UTAH-400 routing switcher and UTAH MC-400 master-control switcher, which handle 12 Fox and ABC stations serving six Montana markets.

USA Gymnastics expanded its coverage leading up to the 2012 Olympic Games, extending its television agreement with NBC Sports through 2010 and naming Universal Sports as its official cable and digital media partner, also through 2012.

The audio signals for the July 14 Bastille Day celebration in Paris were distributed by a Riedel Communications RockNet installation installed by French integrator BS Technology, with the equipment delivered by Apex.

Comcast SportsNet and CN8, The Comcast Network raked in 34 Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award nominations, which recognize excellence in news, programming, and individual achievement in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

ESPN increased its coverage of X Games 15 to nearly 10 hours per day, compared with six and seven for the past two events, and it paid off, as the network posted its most-watched X Games ever, earning a 1.0 rating and tallying an average of 988,000 households and 1.393 million viewers.

NBA TV will celebrate the 50th birthday of Hall of Famer Earvin “Magic” Johnson with Magic’s 50!, a special set to air on Johnson’s birthday, Aug. 14, at 6 p.m. ET.

NBC will dispatch its entire Today team to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, reports Kevin Allocca of TVNewser.

Sports technology company 94Fifty captures up to 6,000 pieces of information per second from embedded sensors in a moving object such as a basketball, soccer ball, or hockey puck, and the data are uploaded to an off-site server and analyzed in seconds, reports Michael Grotticelli of BroadcastEngineering in a look at how miniature, wireless, hand-held digital cameras are affecting sports production.

By the first pitch of the 2010 Major League Baseball season, gear from Riedel Communications will be installed in all 30 MLB ballparks for use by its cable-television channel, MLB Network, for remote communications by its crews, BroadcastEngineering reports.

Virtual ads, long a staple of Major League Baseball telecasts, may hit the ice during the upcoming National Hockey League season, as the Colorado Avalanche, New Jersey Devils, New York Islanders, and New York Rangers are discussing their use with their respective regional sports networks, Michael McCarthy of USA Today reports.

Fox will make several changes to its National Football League coverage team, reports Michael Hiestand of USA Today. The network’s lead announcing teams—Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, and Kenny Albert and Darryl Johnston—and its studio show will remain unchanged, aside from Jillian Reynolds going on maternity leave.

“Sunday’s Red Sox-Yanks was so junked up with every-pitch over-analysis, banal conversation, Joe Morgan’s short-story-made-long nonsense, mindless graphics and an endless, forget-the-game interview with Luis Tiant—ESPN had a documentary about him the next night—that my e-mail box, by Monday afternoon, three times had maxed out,” Phil Mushnick of the New York Post wrote about ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball telecast of the Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Major League Baseball game.

Tiger Woods is on the prowl again, and TNT couldn’t be happier, reports Diane Pucin of the Los Angeles Times. The cable network has to be ecstatic that Woods’ game seems to have come back in full force during one of the only two majors it gets to air, the PGA Championship.

Spike TV and Showtime will grapple in the mixed-martial-arts octagon Saturday, when the former replays some of the top matches from pay-per-view event UFC 100, competing against the latter’s Strikeforce, in which Gina Carano will battle Christiane “Cyborg” Santos, reports Alex Weprin of Broadcasting & Cable.

Golf Channel will air more than 10 continuous hours of daily live coverage of the Solheim Cup women’s team golf competition Friday, Aug. 21 and Saturday, Aug. 22, then return for the final Sunday from 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m., reports Mike Reynolds of Multichannel News.

The TV rights to the Argentine Football Association’s first-division league are up for grabs after the AFA terminated its contract with Television Satelital Codificada, a venture of local media companies Grupo Clarin and Torneos y Competencias, reports Charles Newbery of Variety.

CBS News says there will be no conditions placed on CBS Sports host James Brown’s interview with National Football League quarterback Michael Vick on 60 Minutes Sunday, and the network explained its decision to let Brown conduct the interview to Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik.

Boston Red Sox broadcaster Jerry Remy made his second trip to Fenway Park since being treated for lung cancer in late April and told reporters he’s also been batting depression, Sean McAdam of the Boston Herald reports.

Versus will examine the business behind sports with new series The $ports Take, from Atlanta-based Career Sports & Entertainment, which will debut on the network Aug. 25 and air Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m., reports Mike Reynolds of Multichannel News.

“If you’re going to introduce instant replay to your sport, shouldn’t there be an obligation to use the best technology available?” wrote Mark Kiszla of The Denver Post in reaction to an apparent grand-slam home run by Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki that was ruled foul on the field, with the ruling upheld after a delay of more than four minutes for the umpires to consult the instant replay.

What do you get when you compress 400 hours of footage from the National Football League’s Cincinnati Bengals’ training camp into one hour? You get the debut episode of HBO’s Hard Knocks: Training Camp, which will air on the pay network Wednesday at 10 p.m., reports Joe Reedy of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Baltimore Ravens quarterback Troy Smith may run and throw, but he does not tweet. Edward Lee of The Baltimore Sun reports that Twitter account TroySmith10, which “used questionable language and disparaged Baltimore,” was not created by Smith.

Twitter went down last week, and the world got very quiet. People didn’t know what do with themselves; they wanted to tweet the news that Twitter was down, but that was out of the question. Entire overheard conversations went unremarked upon, and mini-reviews of recent episodes of True Blood withered on the vine.