“Welcome to the ESPN diner.”

Those are the first words that greet me as I walk onto the brand-new SportsCenter set on ESPN's Bristol, Connecticut, campus on a humid summer afternoon. They're spoken by longtime SportsCenter anchor and radio host Dan Patrick, who gestures with his chin toward the 18-foot-high video tower that lords over the room. “Not bad, right?” he adds in his drier-than-the-desert deadpan.

The diner quip, of course, is a joke. Purplish art deco overtones aside, little about the 5,000-square-foot room suggests tuna melts or gum-snapping waitresses. Its high-tech amenities include that 18-foot tower, a wall of glass that's clear when charged with electricity but otherwise opaque so that three projectors can beam images or video onto it from behind, and a studio floor containing 5,000 fiber-optic lights that can be synced to the show music. Overall, the set has 12 high-definition projectors and 11 LCD screens.

“This is like NASA,” says Dana Jacobson, Patrick's SportsCenter co-anchor for the 6 p.m. show. “When people who have been doing this for a living walk in and are totally amazed, that's when you know you have something.”

The SportsCenter studio is the crown jewel of the ESPN Digital Center , which opened its doors on June 7 for the 11 p.m. broadcast of the network's flagship show. And while the mammoth building won't be completed until next year — only one of its three studios and one of its three production control rooms were fully operational as of early July — its very presence says all you need to know about ESPN's commitment to high-definition broadcasting.

Front and Center
The ESPN campus looks and feels like a college. The buildings are spread across 65 acres, with the new facility only a quick jump from a power generator so sturdy that many people on the campus didn't even notice when much of the East Coast went dark in August 2003. “It kicked right in. We were on the air, even though viewers couldn't see us for miles around,” recalls Bryan Burns, vice president for strategic business planning and development.


The new SportsCenter control room features flat-panel monitors at every work position and a series of large "virtual" monitors on the front wall that can divided up to show multiple feeds. 

Even before ESPN broke ground on the estimated $135 million, 120,000-square-foot Digital Center, the network had beaten its media peers to the HD punch. The company launched ESPN HD, a high-definition simulcast channel, in March 2003 and plans to deliver nearly 200 games and original programs in high-def by the end of this year.

Still, ESPN's Powers That Be knew that they would have to upgrade its studio facilities if it hoped to maintain its pole position in the HDTV derby. When the network first brought a high-def camera onto the old SportsCenter set, it revealed a host of previously unnoticed imperfections. “Dirt, things with the lighting — you name it,” recalls Bob Eaton, senior vice president and managing editor. Factor in complications with the wiring and power, and the investment in the new facility began to seem more a necessity than a luxury.

Walking through the Digital Center, I quickly understand why ESPN execs almost trip over themselves in their eagerness to point out its features — a monitor wall here, special German-made rubber flooring there. They wax euphoric about the building's 5 million or so feet of cabling, all of it color-coded (the purple ones are for high-def, the orange ones are for standard-def, and the white ones with a colored stripe carry control-related signals).

One of the facility's most impressive creations was still under construction at the time of my visit. Just a few yards from the SportsCenter set is a cavernous 9,000-square-foot room that, since early September, has housed the network's top trio of football studio shows — Sunday NFL PrimeTime, Sunday NFL Countdown, and Monday Night Countdown. By the start of the 2005 baseball season, a new Baseball Tonight set will occupy another corner of the room.

Writer Larry Dobrow (right) talks to Rick Paiva, executive director of creative services and studio directing, outside the Digital Center.

Between the two areas for sets will be enough space for demonstrations and whatever other out-of-desk experiences the producers can dream up. How will it compare with the demo area on Fox's NFL studio set? “Ours will be a whole lot bigger,” immediately boasts Rick Paiva, executive director for creative services and studio directing. And Ted Szypulski, director of engineering, special projects, excitedly calls attention to the studio's power capabilities: “We can get rock bands in here.”

The Digital Center was originally slated to open in the spring, but execs concede that the schedule was too ambitious. The early June date made more sense, since ESPN had just concluded its coverage of NBA and NHL playoff games.

Was Syzpulski ever nervous that the revamped SportsCenter wouldn't be ready for its high-def debut? “Hell, yeah!” he says in a squeaky, exaggerated voice. “We've been running like crazy.” Much of the effort involved teaching the ESPN techies how to operate the new gadgetry. The problem was that these same people had a show to do several times a day. “I'm just playing linebacker right now,” Paiva adds. “Read and react.”

A New Era
And so it was that on the night of Monday, June 7, ESPN started broadcasting SportsCenter from the Digital Center . The transition wasn't as simple as relocating the show's anchors from one desk to the next and flicking a few switches. The first edition of the show featured a new set and fresh graphics as well as a slightly tweaked version of the familiar da-da-DA-da-da-DA theme music.

Ensconced in his familiar throne on the SportsCenter set, Dan Patrick clearly appreciates the bells and whistles — as witnessed by a middle-of-sentence “Look at that!” when the video tower briefly flares to life — but the bottom line for him remains delivering information cleverly and concisely. “[The technology] visually charges the show for the audience, but it's still an hour of TV. You still have to do your job. As great as it might be, the presentation always comes second.”


SportsCenter co-host Dana Jacobson on the show's new set.

ESPN did experience its share of frustration during its technological growth spurt. In traditional broadcasting, if you buy a tape machine and plug it in, it will likely work as expected. In HDTV, there are lines upon lines of code, which has made debugging tedious and often exasperating for ESPN. “We can't go to somebody else and ask ‘What should we do?' because nobody else has done it,” Bob Eaton says. As a result, many of the company's queries have been routed straight to the R&D folks who helped give birth to the products in question.

Also, as makeup artists dolling up starlets for this year's Academy Awards learned the hard way, HDTV cameras aren't especially forgiving. Burns recalls sitting in a remote production truck before a Dodgers/Angels ESPN broadcast, entranced by the clarity of a pimple on the neck of a Los Angeles pitcher. But the on-air talent doesn't seem especially worried. “The makeup is different, but you go with it,” says Jacobson. Adds Patrick, “Let's face it: we're not good-looking guys. It isn't an issue.”

ESPN hopes to be almost entirely tapeless within two years, though execs say that it's not likely the rest of the broadcasting world will make the digital transition as quickly. To avert potential formatting crises, a room on the top floor of the Digital Center has been stocked with machines that can accommodate nearly every extant video format.

Bryan Burns says he is asked “once an hour” about whether the network plans to broadcast exclusively in high-def, but he doubts it will happen anytime soon. “We'll show The World's Strongest Man at 2 p.m. [in standard-definition], and it'll do fine,” he explains. “That was produced seven years ago in South Africa . It's not a major priority to get it into HD.” By next spring, though, more than half of the network's schedule will be broadcast in high-def.

Not that Patrick would cut much of a figure in high-def as he exits the SportsCenter studio at the end of the day. As he strides briskly toward the elevator bank, he's already shedding his jacket and tie. Seeing me and my photographer standing nearby, he affects a mock-anguished tone: “Go home! Stop stalking me!” He graciously pauses for a click or two, adding, “You're seeing me do what I always do now: strip.” And then the elevator arrives and he disappears with a wave and a smirk. At least for the next few hours, the ESPN diner has closed its kitchen.

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