Connecticut Hold'em

They’re not athletes. In fact, they look conspicuously unhealthy. But there they sit, poker players, on ESPN, displacing dunks and diving catches with stationary bluffs and rolling raises. And there we sit, in significant numbers, watching.

Besides expanding airtime for THE WORLD SERIES OF POKER, ESPN recently aired TILT, a 9-episode scripted dramatic series that pushes several story arcs -- including the efforts of various upstart players and the FBI to take down fictional poker legend Don "The Matador" Everest (Michael Madsen) -- toward an inevitable showdown at a dramatically heightened but credibly staged WORLD SERIES OF POKER.

When ESPN needed an editing solution, they turned to FINAL CUT PRO.

"We’re primarily a sports network, so for us to go into the drama space, we had to have the highest possible production quality," says WILL STAEGER, executive producer of original entertainment programming for sports cable network ESPN, headquartered in Bristol, Connecticut. "We knew we could never spend what THE SOPRANOS or what CSI spends. But since this is a brand shift for us, and we’re trying to educate audiences that ESPN is a destination for this kind of programming, we needed to give them as good as or better than what they can find elsewhere."

One of the biggest cost advantages of OWNERSHIP for ESPN derives from holding and rolling the systems for other network uses. "If we do another season of the show, our editing will be free. We'll be able to re-purpose either the whole system or pieces of it on a second season of TILT, another dramatic series or other films or series we are producing."

Sounds like SOMEONE here understands what we keep preaching.

Connecticut Hold'em