FOX Sports has unveiled a new state-of-the-art digital studio at its studio lot in Los Angeles, Calif., and it will be the place that showcases a variety of original digital productions. The network revealed the studio on Tuesday with the taping of Flippin’ Bats with Ben Verlander and Alex Curry featuring interviews with National Baseball Hall of Fame members John Smoltz and Cal Ripken Jr. The project took nearly three months to complete and prepare for its debut, and implements emerging technologies to pair with modern consumption trends.
The studio itself is 3000 square feet and contains 360 degrees of shooting space complete with a moving LED floor. In looking at the space, there is clear influence from FOX Sports Studio A, the home of its Major League Baseball and National Football League coverage. FOX will look to refresh the brand of its growing digital portfolio through the space, which includes The Joel Klatt Show, State of the Union and The Skip Bayless Show among other programs.
“It was during the pandemic and we were doing all of digital content out of my garage,” Ricardo Perez-Selsky, senior director of digital production operations for FOX Sports, told Barrett Sports Media. “I had actually built a small control room out of my garage in Santa Monica, and we were facilitating all of our digital shows and FS1 programming out of that garage.”
FOX Sports’ digital department was assigned space on the FOX Sports lot in January 2021, a seminal moment for the growing sector of the company. Today, it is responsible for taping about 30 episodes per week and will now be able to minimize the setup and breakdown time required for production. Moreover, the studio is designed to be easily adapted to produce new programming at a moment’s notice and primarily operates with LED displays. In total, the studio has eight movable LED walls, a movable stage and set furniture designed to be repositioned.
“It really gives us maximum flexibility and versatility so that we can create content that’s going to be different,” Perez-Selsky said, “[and] stop you when you’re scrolling on your timeline. All of this content is obviously going to live on our social channels as well as the FOX Sports app.”
Most of FOX Sports’ digital content is produced at a 16:9 aspect ratio conducive for viewing in a horizontal orientation. Rather than crop and zoom the content for vertical viewing, FOX Sports designed the new studio space with vertical (9:16) content in mind. After all, younger generations are consuming this type of content more regularly than some linear programming as the popularity of streaming continues to grow. In fact, the most recent Gauge Report by Nielsen Media Research demonstrates that streaming encompasses 36.4% of daily television consumption for P2+ and the rise of free ad-supported television platforms (FAST) including FOX Corporation-owned Tubi.
The landscape of sports media contains various programs that utilize remote production, including First Take on ESPN. While there have been advancements in technology that more effectively facilitate these shows, Perez-Selsky believes in the value of in-person production and the chemistry it engenders.
“Nothing is really going to compare to getting people together, but being able to physically interact with your set; physically interact with things on an LED wall or on an LED floor…. That’s what you kind of miss out of these remote-style productions,” Perez-Selsky said. “….If everybody else is doing remote production or Zoom-style shows for whatever reason, that’s another way that our content’s going to be able to cut through.”
The control room within the space has direct access to the company’s video router, which gives the team the ability to view over 2,000 cameras simultaneously. Home run production is also possible through the space, expanding the capabilities of the facility to power remotes and stream graphics.
Furthermore, the space can be fitted to include various producers, associate producers and graphics operators or, conversely, contain one director operating everything themselves. It is a contemporary, modern facility with a wide array of capabilities that those within the company view as an important step to enhancing its content and making it distinct in the saturated media ecosystem.
“I’m very bullish on it,” Perez-Selsky said. “I’m hoping to fill this studio seven days a week [with] multiple shows a day [and] just increase the amount of production – not just on the quantity side, but on the quality side. We’ve grown a lot in three years. Three years ago, producing shows out of my garage and everybody in Zoom boxes, where now being able to have a 360-degree space where, really, the possibilities are endless.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
