More than two years after opening a new 194,000-square-foot production center in Bristol, ESPN CTO Aaron LaBerge is making an effort to "treat digital video, on an array of platforms, as a core technological component rather than a repurposed variant of content meant first and foremost for delivery to cable TV subscribers," according to Harry McCracken of FAST COMPANY. ESPN's "means of delivery are still highly visible at the Bristol campus -- most noticeably, the platoon of mammoth satellite dishes sitting outside." What LaBerge and his team have "been building is tougher to spot," since most of it "consists of software, services, miles of cabling, and rows of servers." LaBerge said, "When you think about ESPN maybe five years ago, it was really a linear television company with digital add-ons. We are now literally a content company with multiple forms of distribution and consumption. We don't care where the content goes." McCracken notes ESPN "must produce content in real time, and doing so for multiple platforms only makes the challenge more complex." ESPN Senior VP/Digital Product Placement Ryan Spoon said, "Our world is live. That's the TV strategy. And that is the digital strategy." Highlights "matter at least as much" in '16 as ever, but in an era that "runs at Twitter speed, people want to see them now." ESPN has begun "experimenting with ways to identify highlights without human intervention," but the company is in no rush to "cut its in-house experts out of the loop." McCracken notes ESPN's to-do list includes "identifying, creating, and distributing highlights designed not to please everybody, but special audiences." ESPN also is thinking "about all the social networks where sports fans seek information and is tailoring its content for each rather than pushing out one generic version of ESPN" (FASTCOMPANY.com, 6/14).
