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2015 | Doing Business in Connecticut 37 Film, TV & Digital Media Fast-forward Connecticut's burgeoning film and digital industry is growing the state's economy By Matthew Broderick W hen Mike Soltys was hired as ESPN's first intern in 1980, the notion of an all-sports cable net- work was a long-shot experiment. e Bristol- based campus featured just a 20,000-square-foot facility and a small band of employees to gener- ate limited programming. Times have changed. Today, the Disney-owned ESPN – the un- disputed Worldwide Leader in Sports — has more than 1.16 million square feet of facility space in Bristol alone, more than 4,000 employ- ees and 18 hours of live programming per day. And with evolving consumer demands and new technologies, Soltys said, ESPN has needed to meet sports-crazed fans where they are, which is increasingly in the digital world. at has meant new infrastructure improvements to the campus, including a new 194,000-square-foot digital center completed in 2014. And the corporation has put significantly more resources behind its web and mobile-based tools and content, which are not only producing mind- boggling traffic numbers, but driving ESPN's future. is past January alone — driven by the first-ever college football playoffs, the NFL playoffs and NBA regular season — ESPN's digital platforms reached a record-setting 93.97 million unique U.S. visitors, up 52 percent from January 2014. at's nearly 30 percent of the U.S. population. "Wherever fans are consuming sports, ESPN wants to be there for them," Soltys explained. "We also have many interactive features in our digital products and are very active on social channels like Twitter and Facebook." Americans aren't just visiting ESPN's digital universe; they're consuming it. Fans spent a collective 7.1 billion minutes on ESPN's digital properties in January, up 38% year over year. And the majority of that digital consumption — 58%, in fact — was via a smart phone or tablet, where fans generated 2.1 billion minutes of usage through ESPN apps and watched more than 485 million digital clips, the ninth straight month that the network has surpassed the 400 million mark. And while ESPN, one of the state's largest employers, may have a worldwide audience to drive its numbers, the shi to digital media is being felt across the news media and advertising landscape at all levels, as technology has shied the way people access and engage with information. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly one in 10 U.S. adults get news through Twitter, with 45% of Twitter news consumers Mike Soltys was hired as ESPN's first intern in 1980, when the Bristol-based campus featured just a 20,000-square-foot facility and a small band of employees to generate limited programming. He is now vice president for corporate communications. Continued on page 38 > PHOTO/RICH ARDEN