PGA Championship 2015 live stream: How to watch Thursday’s round online

Update: Live stream info for Friday’s round at the PGA Championship.

The season’s final major has arrived but if you’re ready to dive into the first round, you’re going to have to wait until the afternoon to watch on TV. Unlike the two preceding majors at Chambers Bay and St. Andrews, coverage for the first two rounds is not a full-day broadcast that covers both the morning and afternoon waves. Instead, TNT, making their annual sole appearance at a men’s professional tournament, will not go live until 2 p.m. ET (ESPN, by contrast, was live at 9 a.m. local for The Open last month).

It’s not ideal but the TNT broadcast will still run for a full six hours and catch the headline tee time of the first two days. Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Zach Johnson tee off at 2:20 p.m. ET (1:20 local). So expect to see their every shot when you tune for the late coverage. The coverage is definitely expanded from the antiquated Masters, which goes out of its way to uphold a tradition of limiting TV exposure. But at these majors with full 156-man fields, it would be nice to see at least a portion of the morning wave’s round.

Prior to the 2 p.m. broadcast, you’ll have to rely on the PGA.com featured groups stream to watch anything from Whistling Straits. If you’re into watching Tiger Woods hack it around, fear not, the four-time PGA winner will be on that stream in the morning. Woods, Martin Kaymer, and Keegan Bradley, all past winners of the PGA, will go off at 9:15 a.m. ET and be the main event on the morning side of the draw. So they’ll be the only way you can watch early parts of the first round.

We tend to dramatize everything Tiger does as either the best or the worst, and overemphasize every round. But his start on Thursday is going to be extremely important for what we get out of Tiger the rest of this year, and maybe even beyond that. He’s got to get off to a steady, if not quick start. He keeps making bogeys on almost EVERY single opening hole at the majors, and even at lesser PGA Tour tournaments too. Whatever he does on the range doesn’t translate to his first few holes, and the balls start sailing off the course. Whistling Straits does not have the tightest fairways, but it does hammer the wildest drives with all sorts of junk and jail that promptly result in large crooked numbers on the scorecard. Tiger has to start well -- even if it’s just a string of pars with some fairways and greens in regulation. If not, it could get real ugly real fast on the marquee groups stream and his season may be over just nine holes into his PGA start.

In the afternoon, once TNT joins the proceedings, there will be two more stream options on top of that marquee groups stream. There’s a simulcast stream of the TV coverage and another stream focusing on the four par-3s. Those are some of the more challenging and/or scenic holes at Whistling Straits. So you’ve got plenty of late options to ignore your work on an August Thursday afternoon. Here’s the full media schedule:

2 to 8 p.m. -- TNT

Noon to 7 p.m. -- PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 93/208)

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