When the world watches the 2028 Summer Olympics, much of that coverage will be routed through a familiar piece of Los Angeles: a Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank.
The decision
LA28 organizers have selected Warner Bros.' facility known as The Ranch, in Burbank, to serve as the International Broadcast Center for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, The Hollywood Reporter reported. It is a notable shift: organizers had previously planned to base the broadcast center at Hollywood Park Studios in Inglewood, near SoFi Stadium, as Variety reported.
What a broadcast center does
The International Broadcast Center, or IBC, is the global hub of an Olympics. It is where the world's rights-holding broadcasters set up shop to receive, produce and beam out the coverage that reaches billions of viewers. Housing it requires an enormous, technically sophisticated footprint, with soundstages, connectivity, power and space for thousands of broadcast workers.
Why the studio lot
That is where a Hollywood back lot has an advantage. The Ranch offers the kind of soundstage capacity and production infrastructure built for exactly this sort of large-scale television work, and organizers concluded it was better suited to the scale and technical demands of the Games' broadcast operation, Variety reported. Under the revised plan, the Inglewood site would take on a supporting role, such as a press center.
What it means for LA
For Los Angeles, the choice underscores how the 2028 Games will lean on the city's existing entertainment infrastructure rather than build everything anew, a defining feature of an Olympics that has promised a "no-build" approach heavy on existing venues. It also puts one of the industry's storied lots at the center of the Games' logistics, with preparations expected to ramp up well before 2028. The competition will play out at venues across the region; the pictures of it, for the rest of the world, will largely originate in Burbank.
