What does $100 million dollars and 194,000 square feet get you these days? Well, if you’re ESPN it builds you a state-of-the-art facility – the ESPN Digital Center 2 – that is unlike any other building in the world.
In late August the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) – the organization serving the professional community of businesses and individuals who provide expertise, support, tools and the infrastructure for the creation and finishing of motion pictures, television, commercials, digital media and other dynamic media content – gave their Award for Creativity and Innovation to ESPN’s Digital Center 2.
In June of 2014 ESPN’s flagship program, SportsCenter, executed the first broadcast from Studio X of Digital Center 2. As a result one of the most well known sports programs in the world underwent a complete overhaul to its on-air look and operational capabilities.
The Creativity and Innovation Award from the HPA is intended to highlight organizations that push the envelope for creative storytelling via technical innovation. According to an HPA press release, the honor of winning the award will be bestowed on November 12th, 2015 at the 10th annual HPA Awards gala at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, CA.
The HPA awards jury chose to select the Digital Center 2 because it was the first large-scale, IP-based media production facility of its kind. It demonstrated not only technological innovation, but more importantly – in the eyes of the HPA awards jury – it laid the groundwork for the future of media facilities to build upon.
“Using technology to create, enhance and distribute content is one of our key advantages, and helps us fulfil our mission: to serve sports fans, anytime, anywhere,” said Jonathan Pannaman, vice president of content and production systems at ESPN. “Digital Center 2 is the embodiment of that premise.”
It makes a lot of sense for ESPN – a company built off of the ability to create and disseminate media content – to invest in such a facility. As we’ve seen in the exponential times we live in, the digital world is rapidly advancing and media facilities of the future will have to be able to keep up with the dozens of platforms that their audience consumes content on around the clock and around the world.
This Digital Center 2 is the perfect embodiment of the direction the media world is going in. Which is to say, more specific, digital content is needed to be distributed across various mediums 24/7 for the ESPN’s of the world to stay relevant.
ESPN built its booming business on television. But with modern digital platforms taking more viewers away from the main screen and scattering their focus across multiple screens, the Digital Center 2 is strategically poised to make the giant behemoth that is ESPN more nimble in today’s fluid media space that is being taken over by new mediums.