ESPN’s Chuck Pagano is not your typically brassy sports executive. His low-key personality belies his status as an industry "playa" who scored a spot on the Sporting News Power 100 list. He loves to mix it up with the troops, rarely utters a sports clich¿nd refuses to get caught up in the celebrity hype of ESPN’s universe. Above all, he says he doesn’t take himself too seriously. "Seriously," he emphasizes.

But Pagano—a onetime ESPN technical director who is now executive vice president of technology—will need to draw upon the goodwill and leadership skills accumulated during his nearly three decades there to tackle his biggest challenge yet: fusing the long-separated TV, IT and new media divisions into a single business unit bound by a strategic vision of ESPN’s future in the age of digital and high-definition entertainment.

Creating a team where one hasn’t existed won’t be easy. "We all have our little domains of business expertise. You start to get tunnel vision, and that’s what was happening," Pagano says. "I’m pushing everyone toward the same strategic mission."

Push is the operative word. ESPN and other broadcast and media companies face increasing market pressure to develop new business models that embrace the emerging digital technologies craved by consumers. At the same time, companies must also figure out how to control and manage their content in an online world that scoffs at intellectual property rights.

ESPN’s strategy going forward is simple: Give ’em what they want, when they want and how they want. "More than anybody else, ESPN has been really aggressive with using new ways to get to consumers through new channels, with a combination of traditional and digital media," says Adi Kishore, the Yankee Group’s director of media and entertainment strategies.

How the company will continue to do that, Pagano says, is by taking first-mover risks to deliver content across all mediums and by investing in leading-edge technologies such as video-on-demand to get it there. "This is our priority: to serve the fan any way we can, through any pipe, any device, in whatever way they want to consume us, embrace us, fondle us and blow in our ear," Pagano says. "We don’t wait for the trends to be developed."

Pagano’s strategy hinges on transforming ESPN from a massive collector of videotape into a nimble data center that quickly disseminates multimedia sports content over IP and broadband networks to PCs, mobile phones and iPods. At the heart of that strategy is ESPN’s Digital Center, a technically sophisticated TV production facility that is the springboard for the leap into all-digital multimedia operations.