’s rebuilt Studio W has gone on air, and the studio is already set to take over a bigger role. It made its debut Saturday, Aug. 29, during ABC college football halftime and wraps coverage, and on Wednesday, Sept. 9, it becomes the permanent home of NFL Live.
That move matters because NFL Live airs weekdays at 4 p.m. ET, putting one of ’s most visible NFL shows into a space designed for constant live production rather than a one-off showcase. The same studio will also anchor college football, NHL programming and Fantasy Focus Countdown on NFL Sundays, giving it a reach well beyond one flagship show.
Tony Lacaprucia said the studio was built over the past eight months and called it the next chapter in how brings sports to life. He said the new setup includes 148 million pixels, real-time virtual environments, advanced camera technologies, display automation and a new lighting complement. Those details are the point: Studio W is not a refreshed set inside the old structure. It was rebuilt from the ground up inside ’s Digital Center 2, because the capabilities wanted were not available in off-the-shelf solutions.
Jason Black said worked closely with Pixotope to build a custom integration, while Jeremiah Swartz said the hardest part was making multiple cameras shoot the same virtual environment at once without losing synchronization or image quality. Joe Ferretti said the 8,900-square-foot studio was designed with Jack Morton Worldwide, while Creative Studio helped shape the XR scene creative, studio environment designs, sales and integration elements, and the workflows that tie it all together. That is what separates Studio W from the old NFL studio home it once held, and from the version dedicated to Chris Berman and Tom Jackson in 2017.
The practical question now is not whether Studio W can handle live sports. It already has. The real test comes when NFL Live settles in on Sept. 9 and the studio has to do the same job every weekday at 4 p.m. ET, while still serving college football, NHL coverage and fantasy football. If the new space looks different on the air, it will be because built it to make that kind of shifting production feel seamless rather than staged.
