(l-r) Mayor Ken Cockayne (striped tie), Conn. Governor Dannel Malloy, ESPN president John Skipper, SportsCenter anchor Sara Walsh and Congressman John Larson at the opening ceremonies. / Joe Faragon/ESPN images
Bristol, CT – ESPN’s Digital Center-2 (DC-2), a 194,000sf, five-studio media facility, had its ceremonial opening this summer on the network’s Bristol campus, a 123 acre site that includes some 1.2 million sf of space in 18 buildings.
SportsCenter was the first program to debut from the new state-of-the-art studio, followed by NFL programming.
DC-2’s infrastructure is future proof. The facility is format agnostic, currently planned for 1080p, and can handle all existing media formats and future industry standards capable of carrying data/signals at various rates, that haven’t yet been adopted by the television industry.
The architect was HLW International, headquartered in NYC, and the construction manager was The Associated Construction Company of Hartford.
DC-2’s SportsCenter studio is designed to support 24/7 programming, and allows for distinct differentiation of each show.
The unique environment features a video floor, virtual technology, two touchscreens, a 56 LED multi-dimensional monitor wall and the ability to do live and pre-produced segments simultaneously.
The new SportsCenter set is divided by an enormous glass wall separating the 6,200sf Studio X, which will be home to those programs on ESPN and ESPN2, from the 3,500sf Studio XA – The Annex – from where SportsCenter on ESPNEWS will originate.
The center of the annex will feature a large glass cube/work station, housing a new “SC Display Unit,” dedicated to overseeing what appears in the set’s 114 video and graphic display monitors.
The nearly 10,000sf SportsCenter studio is twice the size of the current studio and contains 100 more monitors than the original digital center studio that debuted in June 2004.
