BBC Sport Centre opens at MediaCity Salford

December 5, 2011   ·   0 Comments

The new BBC Sport Centre, the multi-platform home of sports news opened at the MediaCity base in Salford on Monday 5 December. 

Online sports operations had, until now, been based on the fourth floor of Quay House, but from this week they’ll be on the ground floor with their broadcast colleagues. Final Score will also start its Salford broadcasts from the MediaCityUK studio block on Saturday. From March, the site will host the half-hourly sport updates on the BBC News Channel and BBC World and will also see TV, radio and online news teams work from one office for the first time. 

Speaking to Ariel, Sport Interactive editor Stuart Rowson said, ‘Sport news is in the TVC newsroom at the moment, and Online was at the back of the building on the fifth floor, so they never worked closely or were in the same office space. For the first time all of the sport news output will be together, that’s the vision of Salford for us.’

Rowson added : ‘We’ve got fewer people than we had in London but it’s been a case of reprioritising and going [along with] the whole BBC Sport strategy, which is big live events done fantastically well and sports news delivered across all platforms – that’s what we’re really focusing on now’

View of the new BBC Sport Centre at MediaCity, Salford (posted by @stuartrowson on twitter)

Relaunch for BBC Sport website

The sport website will also be relaunched in the new year, four years after its last refresh, and online Olympic treatment will include 10,000 athlete pages, 2,500 hours of coverage and 24 AV streams. Satellite sport offices in Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow will also feed content to the new Salford centre.

BBC Sport Online, initially launched in 2000, is Europe’s biggest sport website and reaches a weekly average of 11.3m in the UK – its live-text coverage of Saturday football is often the most-viewed BBC online story every week.

Tags: BBC Sport, BBC Sport Centre, MediaCity, Salford, Stuart Rowson