Skanska starts Warsaw media centre build

Skanska has started construction of the Live Park Media Centre in Warsaw, a €20m specialist facility designed to support remote football production and broadcast technology for Ekstraklasa.

The project will provide TV studios, production and post-production areas, advanced IT infrastructure, and systems for remote match production. The building has also been designed to support future VAR operations and semi-automated offside technology if required.

Completion is scheduled for the end of 2027, with remote match production expected to begin in 2028 once technical equipment has been installed. Skanska is acting as general contractor on the scheme.

A media production centre is a highly technical building rather than a standard studio shell. The brief requires controlled environments, acoustic performance, resilient digital infrastructure, broadcast connectivity, secure technical areas, reliable power, cooling capacity, and layouts that allow production teams to manage live content under operational pressure.

Remote production places additional strain on the building services strategy. Instead of sending full production teams and large volumes of equipment to every venue, centralised hubs can process, manage, and distribute live content from a single facility. That model depends on high-capacity data links, low-latency workflows, resilient IT systems, specialist control rooms, and carefully planned circulation between technical and production spaces.

The Warsaw project therefore brings construction, sports technology, and digital infrastructure into a single delivery brief. The finished building will be judged not only by completion of the structure and fit-out, but by its ability to support continuous broadcast operations. Power resilience, cooling, connectivity, commissioning, and specialist equipment installation will sit close to the critical path.

That type of requirement is becoming more common across European building projects. Data centres, laboratories, healthcare facilities, control rooms, education buildings, and transport operations centres increasingly require contractors to coordinate the building fabric with complex technical systems. On these schemes, late design changes often emerge around M&E coordination, commissioning, redundancy, and equipment interfaces rather than the visible structure.

Sports infrastructure is also moving beyond stadiums and training grounds. Leagues and operators are investing in production hubs, digital content, officiating systems, analytics, fan engagement, and remote operations. A broadcast centre can improve how a competition produces and distributes matches, but it needs a building designed around technical continuity from the outset.

For Skanska, the scheme adds another specialist facility to a Central European construction market where clients are demanding higher operational performance from buildings. General contractors working on such projects have to coordinate more closely with technology suppliers, consultants, operators, and future end users before handover.

The construction programme will now need to keep structure, envelope, services, interior fit-out, and broadcast technology aligned. A 2028 operational start leaves limited tolerance for late redesign once technical installation begins, particularly where cabling routes, acoustic treatment, cooling loads, equipment rooms, and control-room layouts are fixed by the building works.

The Live Park Media Centre shows how specialist buildings are becoming more systems-led. The physical asset remains the foundation, but the value of the project will depend on how effectively the completed facility supports the technology, people, and workflows it is being built to house.