Sony’s Beyond Sports is collaborating with ESPN, the NFL, Disney, and The Simpsons to produce The Simpsons Funday Football, a real-time animated alternate presentation of a Monday Night Football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024.

“Sports leagues, broadcasters, and content producers must continually develop innovative options for reaching and retaining newer audiences that are accustomed to enjoying content experiences customized to their tastes,” says Sander J. Schouten, managing director and co-founder at Beyond Sports.

“We are focused on meeting the expectations of each demographic by being visible on the platforms they are using and speaking in the way they want to be spoken to when it comes to their viewing habits.”

The Dec. 9 Funday Football altcast for the Bengals-Cowboys matchup marks the latest example of Sony’s efforts to engage the next generation of NFL fans leveraging its unique partnership with the NFL. As an official technology partner of the NFL, Sony has extended its Hawk-Eye Innovations’ officiating and tracking technology of the league’s games to Beyond Sports’ real-time visualization platform.

This will also be the second ever NFL alternate presentation Beyond Sports has collaborated with the NFL and ESPN on with the first broadcast being the 2023 NFL Toy Story Funday Football broadcast featuring the Atlanta Falcons vs. Jacksonville Jaguars game in London, set in Andy’s Room in the Toy Story universe. That altcast was ESPN’s first fully animated NFL telecast, delivering the biggest live event to-date on Disney+ (based on peak concurrency).

2024 Lighting Controls and Fixtures Report

Lightapalooza took place in late February, and the growth of the event has mirrored the rapid ascension lighting fixtures and controls.

Download your copy now!

Funday Football Gives Broadcasters an Opportunity to Flex Augmented Reality Tech

While something like the Funday Football altcast is largely meant to engage new and existing sports audiences, the technology being used on the back-end highlights how far augmented reality tech has come. According to Sony the altcast uses a combination of data processing and real-time visualization technology from Beyond Sports to motion map the characters onto the live sports recording.

Beyond Sports’ technology is designed to combine two data sources and analyze, validate, enhance, translate those sources into a 3D environment so it can stream to a desired platform in real-time, with a delay of less than a second. Sony suggests that visualization allows for the addition of more storytelling aspects to the broadcast.

This, the company continues, can be done through the addition of a new 3D environment or characters, educational or entertaining clips, replays from all angles, and live virtual commentators. Special visuals, events, and animations can be triggered either manually or through the data adding additional storytelling layers and making the live stream more fun to watch.

The December Funday Football telecast for the Bengals-Cowboys games will also use tracking data supplied by Sony’s Hawk-Eye technology platform and the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, enabling Beyond Sports to create a viewing experience that complements the live game through a blend of traditional sports broadcasting and animation.

Viewers can expect to see Homer and Bart on the sidelines, Marge and Lisa interviewing players during the game; Maggie operating the SkyCam, and additional interactive elements including animated virtual commentators.

The global electronics company says that Beyond Sports’ virtual commentator technology further will even go so far as to implement Simpsonized versions of the actual announcers calling the game into the animated production, using a virtual reality headset to capture the real commentators’ upper body movements and facial expressions to create 3D animations.

The Simpsons Funday Football alternate viewing presentation will stream on Disney+ and ESPN+ and on mobile with NFL+ alongside the Bengals-Cowboys matchup on Dec. 9 2024.

• Page 1