The Simpsons Funday Football: Inside the Tech That ESPN and the NFL Use To Bring Springfield to Life The alternative broadcast relies on Sony's Beyond Sports tech and Hawk-Eye data By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Monday, December 9, 2024 - 3:24 pm
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The world of alternative broadcasts is expanding once again. Tonight, ESPN will roll out The Simpsons Funday Football on ESPN2, Disney+, ESPN+, and NFL+ (mobile). SVG goes behind the scenes in Springfield (and Bristol) with in-depth coverage of every aspect of the production:
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW: Inside the Tech That ESPN and the NFL Use To Bring Springfield to Life (FULL STORY BELOW)
PRODUCTION OPERATIONS: The Game May Be Set in Springfield, but the Production Team Is in Bristol
CREATIVE PHILOSOPHY: ESPN Creative Studio's Michael Spike' Szykowny Pulls Back the Curtain on Creative Process
TRACKING TECHNOLOGY: Sony's Beyond Sports CEO Sander Shouten Analyzes How Tracking Tech Enables Real-Time Animated Altcasts
MUSIC & THEME SONG: ESPN Records Unique Twist on Monday Night Football Theme for Animated Alternative Broadcast
Altcast Sophistication Illustrates Evolution of Animated Broadcasts The Simpsons Funday Football not only promises to be filled with more humor and schtick than previous alternative broadcasts but also demonstrates how quickly the technology is evolving to power such broadcasts.
I think this is the most alternate of the alternate broadcasts, says Phil Orlins, VP, production, ESPN. To me, this is the true alternative because we're not just treating the game or wrapping it with an alteration. We're actually re-creating the game in a truly alternative universe. By design, we're explicitly pursuing the interest of fans who may not want to watch the game in the conventional manner, and I think that is really important.
Tonight's broadcast involves creative elements representing everything from the Simpsons writing staff to the ESPN graphics team, which continues to get more and more reps with such broadcasts. Those creative elements make use of some key technology pieces that make it all possible and, increasingly, allow the. shows to become even more sophisticated.
Explains Josh Helmrich, senior director, media strategy, business development and Next Gen Stats, NFL, We always had this vision when we started player-involved tracking, which is what we call the Next Gen Stats platform, to create benefits for the entire ecosystem of the NFL. One of those is bringing new experiences to our fans and creating more engaging content. With the Beyond Sports team and Hawk-Eye data, we've been able to take it to the next level. The more creative and engaging content we can create, the better. We continue to grow, thanks to great partners like ESPN and Beyond Sports.
According to Orlins, the constant and rapid progress with the technology that started with single-point tracking just a couple of years ago and relatively basic movements has evolved to blended tracking, which is single-point NGS tracking combined with the Hawk-Eye tracking. He credits Sony's Beyond Sports co-founder/Chief Technology Officer Nicolaas Westerhof and his team with taking the alternative broadcast to new heights.
Our 3-D simulation is based, first, on positional tracking data, explains Westerhof. We have two sources coming together. The single-point tracking data provided by Next Gen Stats relies on trackers in the shoulder pads of the player and gives us a very stable feed of the position of the player.
The secondary source, he notes, is optical tracking that provides skeletal data from 29 points on each player's body and limbs. The secret sauce provided by Beyond Sports is to combine the two sets of data in an accurate way.
It allows us to get a lot closer to the actual players' movement and give the [animated characters] detailed movement, Westerhof explains. It's a little less stable than the single-point tracking, but, when it works, you want to use it as much as possible because it provides the detail.
Tonight's effort takes things to yet another height. Characters like Lisa Simpson, for example, will not be as tall as Dallas Cowboys wide receiver CeeDee Lamb. So, when the Beyond Sports system tracks a ball thrown to a real-world 6-foot-2 receiver but the shorter Lisa Simpson animated character is what the viewer sees, the Beyond Sports system needs to adjust the flight of the ball so that it lands in the hands of Lisa Simpson.
With data processing, says Westerhof, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. That is difficult to do, especially in real time, and a whole bunch of different processes are going on in the background on our side, mostly machine-learning processes, to make that happen. It needs to be adjusted on the fly as we don't know beforehand what character is going to be in what play. We spent a lot of time on making the system as flexible as possible, because we don't know what's going to happen.
The advances in Hawk-Eye have been driven by a broad technical partnership between Sony and the NFL that began in the summer and is being expanded to other aspects of the NFL's business. This alternate broadcast is a good example of [that expansion], from a Hawk-Eye perspective, says Sony Chief Commercial Officer Michael Markovich. The more data we capture, the better it gets, and we can deliver more use cases from it. As this data gets better and the systems get better and we have more reps and trials, obviously, we get to do things like the Simpsons game and the Toy Story game and, hopefully, even more serialized or episodic media content.
He also sees a role for this sort of data in officiating: Our number-one focus on the Hawk-Eye side is to use the optical trac
