NFL’s L.A. Chargers Unveil LED Stage for High-End Content Creation at Its $250 Million Practice Facility the Bolt
by Carole Horst · VarietyThe Los Angeles Chargers are not only riding a winning record into the second half of the season, they are also riding the wave of the future for pro teams with a new content studio at the Bolt, the team’s brand-new practice facility in El Segundo.
The 1,300 square-foot studio sports a 486.5 square-foot LED board and more than 1,500 linear feet of LED lighting. The Bolt, the team’s $250 million practice facility, encompasses a 150,000 square-foot complex in El Segundo, a few miles from SoFi Stadium, which sits on 14 acres and includes three natural grass practice fields. It opened earlier this year.
The complex also includes offices, meeting rooms and and event space. Verizon provides a private 5G network throughout the facility.
Related Stories
The Great Cable Rollup That Will Never Be
CMA Awards Show Adds a Dozen Performers, Including Noah Kahan, Kelsea Ballerini, Jelly Roll, Kacey Musgraves
The studio will be used for what senior VP, brand creative and content Jason Lavine calls “football adjacent” content creation. With the NFL, he notes, the audience demand “is unlike the other sports,” while with a team roster of 53 players, “you have more stories to tell.”
Lavine says that the studio’s capabilities are endless given the sophistication of the LED technology coupled with the power of AI and graphics.
“If any partner wants to come and they want a boat, we’ll make it look like the beach,” he says, adding that studio can host something as simple as a podcast to complex graphics for any branded content campaign. “We also want to make it flexible enough that we hope this is something that people in Los Angeles would take advantage of. We intend to make it readily available for rent.”
Lavine says, “Our content plan is completely flexible to what our fans engage with and what our partners want. So it’s not a matter of saying, ‘Here’s the 10 things we’re going to do in this studio.’ It’s more a matter of saying we can make whatever we need to make, and we could do it at a really, really high level because of how we built the studio,” he says, giving credit to the team ownership and the org’s execs as well.