ESPN Plans Studios Next to Staples Center

ESPN, the cable television sports giant, expects to dramatically bolster its Southern California presence by building a television and radio production center and an ESPN Zone sports bar and restaurant in the downtown entertainment district that AEG has proposed for a parking lot next to Staples Center.

ESPN announced plans for the $100-million, five-story building Thursday, minutes before Los Angeles officials joined AEG executives in a ceremonial groundbreaking for the LA Live sports and entertainment district.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa joined other speakers in praising AEG’s vision for the sports and entertainment complex.

Villaraigosa said the development, which will include a 1,000-room hotel, restaurants, retail shops, a 7,100-seat live theater and a 15-screen movie complex, was proof of Los Angeles’ being the “creative capital of the country and the entertainment capital of the world.”

The ESPN facility, when completed in 2009, will produce live and taped programming for the network’s growing family of sports channels. The 70,000-square-foot television production facility will include two state-of-the-art, high-definition television studios.

ESPN eventually will add West Coast on-air talent and beam broadcasts live from downtown Los Angeles to the rest of the world.

“This is a big day for our company,” said George Bodenheimer, president of both ESPN Sports and ABC Sports and co-chairman of Disney Media Networks. “An expanded base in Los Angeles will help fuel our overall long-term growth.”

ESPN has a relatively small presence in Los Angeles, where it operates a regional sales office and a news bureau. ESPN also manages the X Games competitions from an office in Los Angeles and operates an ESPN Zone restaurant in Anaheim.

Most of the company’s programming is produced in studios at its headquarters in Bristol, Conn., and studios in New York. ESPN uses Southern California studios to produce talk-show host Jim Rome’s “Rome Is Burning” and the new “ESPN Hollywood” show.

The ESPN television studio will remedy what Tim Leiweke, president and chief executive of privately held AEG, has described as a glaring absence of live television stemming from “the content and entertainment capital of the world.”

Leiweke praised ESPN for agreeing to build its West Coast regional headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.

Bodenheimer said it was “premature” to say what programming would be produced in Los Angeles.

The two studios that will fill 70,000 square feet should be able to accommodate a variety of programming, including some of the network’s signature “SportsCenter” shows.

Bodenheimer also said the Southern California center would play a significant role in producing content produced for ESPN Deportes, the company’s Spanish-language sports channel.

Some in the television industry had expected ESPN to move into Burbank, where parent company Walt Disney Co. has its headquarters. ESPN Senior Vice President Bob Eaton said that the network chose the downtown studio so it could “benefit from all of the excitement you’re going to see at Staples with LA Live.”

To that end, a roof-top camera will provide scenic shots of the downtown Los Angeles skyline to the north, while studio windows will turn the adjacent Staples Center and the soon-to-be-built entertainment complex into live background sets -- in much the same way that television studios in New York use Times Square as a scenic backdrop.

The ESPN Zone restaurant and bar that will be incorporated into ESPN’s downtown location will put the company in direct competition with Fox Sports, which operates a Fox Sports Grill and a regional television studio inside Staples Center.

According to Fox spokesman Lou D’Ermilio, ESPN’s arrival will not affect either of those locations, and the studio will continue to host the nightly “Southern California Sports Report.”