Back in 2012 I got invited on a tour of DIRECTV’s Los Angeles Broadcast Center. At the time it was the most advanced broadcast center in the world. It probably still is, but take a look at my review of it. It hasn’t aged well, unfortunately.
From the old-school DIRECTV logo on the building to the matrix of standard-definition monitors, it doesn’t look good for this review. I mean, it still looks like a cool place to visit, but frankly I’m surprised that it hasn’t aged well at all. Even the server racks with their on-demand servers look kind of goofy compared to what you see today. And, I have to imagine that there is probably fifty times as much content stored there today and so all those servers have been replaced twice over by now.
Take another look
Here’s another look at the Broadcast center, from a DIRECTV video made all the way back in 2001.
When you look at this one, and compare it with the one I did a decade later, the change is pretty astounding. I’m willing to bet there’s even more of a change now.
Still around
This recent Google Earth imagery of the broadcast center has it looking more or less the same as it did a decade ago. I’ll grant you that the facade doesn’t look quite as modern as it did a generation ago. But all the antennas are still out there and there might even be one or two more. The building is absolutely as massive as it looks here, too.
Unfortunately, it’s not open to the public for tours. It’s hard to get an invite in. It was just as hard a decade ago, though, so maybe one of these days I’ll give it another shot.
