• by Paul Gough , December 11, 2003

ESPN is moving further into the digital age.

At a Credit Suisse First Boston media conference on Wednesday afternoon, both Disney Chief Financial Officer Tom Staggs and ESPN President George Bodenheimer said that ESPN and the rest of Disney's companies were investing heavily in what it considers to be the future of entertainment.

One of the biggest initiatives is ESPN's Digital Center, a two-year building and technology project scheduled to be completed in the spring at the network's Bristol, Conn., headquarters. It will tie together a lot of ESPN's initiatives and position them for the future of TV.

Another digital initiative, ESPN Motion, is receiving a lot of plaudits for blazing a trail for the future of advertising on the Internet. ESPN Motion was developed with Disney's Internet unit and kicked off late last year. It provides video content downloaded to Internet users' desktops, interspersed with advertising.

It's caught on with ESPN users, with two million downloads of the application since the service officially launched in February. Bodenheimer said that 30 of ESPN's biggest advertisers have signed on, including Sony and Lexus.

"Big companies, all seeing the value in what we're doing," Bodenheimer said.

--Paul J. Gough