Media Assets
On Monday, December 9, ESPN will offer fans three distinctly different viewing options – across six platforms – for Monday Night Football’s Week 14 matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Dallas Cowboys.
Anchoring coverage of Bengals-Cowboys will be the traditional, main telecast of Monday Night Football on ESPN, ABC and ESPN Deportes, with Joe Buck, Troy Aikman and Lisa Salters and Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli will air on ESPN2.
ESPN’s newest Monday Night Football alternate telecast, The Simpsons Funday Football will premiere on Disney+, ESPN+ and NFL+ (on mobile). The much anticipated, additive telecast will feature Bart as a member of the Bengals and Homer with the Cowboys as well as Lisa and Marge serving as on-field sideline reporters.
All telecasts will begin at 8 p.m. ET and will stream on ESPN+ and the ESPN App.
In advance of The Simpsons Funday Football alt-cast, a media conference call was held. A list of speakers and a transcript follows:
The Simpsons Funday Football Media Call – Speakers
- Rosalyn Durant, Executive Vice President, League Programming & Acquisitions
- Phil Orlins, ESPN Vice President, Production
- Hans Schroeder, NFL Media Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
- Matt Selman, Showrunner, The Simpsons
- Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN Vice President, Edit and Animation
- Nicolaas Westerhof, Beyond Sports Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
- Tim Reed, ESPN Vice President, Programming
- Grace Senko, NFL Vice President, Media Strategy & Business Development
- Josh Helmrich, NFL Senior Director, Next Gen Stats
- Michael Markovich, Sony Chief Commercial Officer
OLIVIA CORYELL: Hi, everyone. Welcome and thanks for joining us today for a behind the scenes look at Monday’s animated telecast, the Simpsons Funday Football. I’m Olivia Coryell, director of communications for ESPN streaming and have worked closely with Derek Volner to put this together.
I hope you enjoyed the Simpson Funday Football theme song. It’s a matchup of the Simpsons’ iconic jingle and Heavy Action, our famous Monday Night Football anthem and one of the many assets that was made specifically for this telecast.
As a reminder, the animated telecast features ESPN’s Monday Night Football games, Cincinnati Bengals at Dallas Cowboys and is available to stream on Disney+ and ESPN+.
To start this off, we’re excited to share one of the custom content pieces created for Monday, featuring Homer making an appearance on ESPN’s ManningCast. After that we’ll hear from Ros and Hans.
(Video playing.)
OLIVIA CORYELL: How great was that?
Ros, I’ll go ahead and pass the baton to you to get us going.
ROSALYN DURANT: Awesome. Thank you, Olivia, and that was fantastic.
Good afternoon and thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us.
We are very excited for this presentation. It’s been nearly a year in the making. The planning began in earnest in early 2024. It was an idea that started with our ESPN vice president of programming, Tim Reed, who you will have an opportunity to hear from during Q&A, and from a programming department’s perspective deserves just a ton of credit. So thank you. Thank you, Tim, who is here with me.
Alt telecasts have been a significant part of our ESPN portfolio now more than — it’s been more than a decade. They provide an opportunity to add fresh perspectives and innovations to our storytelling, which is so important to us.
We’ve had tremendous success with the ManningCast, as you saw, which has a strong, dedicated audience and brings in a younger audience. Now this is the second consecutive year that we’ll have an animated NFL telecast.
First up, as you’ll all remember, was Toy Story Funday Football, and now we are very much looking forward to giving Homer and Bart the stage, or, rather, the field, in prime time.
We are fortunate to have an incredible collection of iconic IP at Disney and creative, willing partners across the company who share our enthusiasm for pushing the envelope and doing new things, like Matt, who you’ll hear from. Matthew, we are quite grateful for you.
The Simpsons resonate with fans all around the globe, young and old, and everyone in between be. Audience expansion is a top priority for us at ESPN, and I know it’s a top priority for the NFL, and this is one distinctly Disney way that we’re doing that. It brings together some of the strongest, most iconic brands — ESPN, Disney, NFL, the Simpsons, Sony — all in service of the fan.
The Simpsons Funday Football will be available on Disney+ and ESPN+. The primary game will be on ABC on ESPN, and ESPN+, and we have the ManningCast on ESPN2 and ESPN+. It is a broad reach for broad and expanded audiences.
I want to personally thank the NFL for saying yes, for getting behind this idea so many months ago with their assets and their partnerships. It takes a strong partnership and a lot of work from a lot of people to pull this off.
Hans, Grace, Josh, the rest of the team, we thank you. Hans, would love to hand it to you.
HANS SCHROEDER: Thanks, Ros.
Good afternoon. Good morning to everyone. Hope everybody is doing well and getting ready for the holiday season. We are incredibly excited. How can you not be? Hearing that Simpsons music open and then the transition into Monday Night Football and that iconic theme sort of gives you goosebumps.
We are incredibly excited about Monday night and the opportunity we have collectively with all the parties that have come together here to create the Simpsons Funday Football. You know, for us at the NFL — and Ros hit on some of these similar and common themes — we’re very focused about how we continue to innovate and create new experiences for our fans. New experiences that extend across screens and across new platforms, areas like Disney+ here.
Opportunities to create more expansion globally in the number of 100-plus countries we’ll be in around the world as we bring this type of opportunity to engage with the NFL in a different way to our fans everywhere that they are and in new ways is incredibly exciting to us. And then in a new content format using the Simpsons in an animated way and all the iconic, all the history, all the fandom that the Simpsons have certainly here in the U.S. but globally. They’re truly a global franchise.
So you bring those elements together, and for us what makes it so exciting is to bring those ingredients in a way and tell the story of an NFL game in an entirely new and different way.
We are thrilled about it, and at the core of it and this journey for us really began with the development of our Next Gen stats platform and the ability to take all the data that’s generated off the field and really use it in a number of different ways, this being a particularly exciting one, to fund and feed the animation that you’re going to see brought to life with Beyond Sports and how they do that.
We’re just really thrilled about. You’ll hear later from Grace Senko, who has really led this from an NFL perspective, has brought this together, helped lead the Toy Story experience we did a year ago. And then Josh Helmrich as well, who is our general manager of the Next Gen Stats platform and has led how that platform and the data that it creates feed into this experience and bring it to life.
We are always looking for the next way to engage our fans in a new way, fans of all ages and in all places. There’s no better way than when you can marry that incredible IP that Disney brings with the Simpsons to the NFL experience to a game with two exciting teams, stars, the Bengals and the Cowboys, on Monday night. We’re just thrilled and excited.
For us when we engaged and started on this journey to bring this alternative way to present NFL games last year with Toy Story and this year with the Simpsons, we still think we’re scratching the surface, and there’s more of these fun experiences to bring together and bring to life. No better partner than Disney to do that with.
We’re really excited. Excited to answer any questions you have. We’re excited for Monday night.
Olivia, I’ll hand it back over to you, I think.
OLIVIA CORYELL: Right on. Thank you so much, Ros and Hans for kind of setting the table for us.
We’ll keep things moving and bring up Phil Orlins and Nico Westerhoff.
PHIL ORLINS: Thanks, Liv, and great to see everybody out there. Good to catch up with you guys. I’ll try to be brief here and get this to the true stars of this who bring this incredible collaboration to life, both creatively with Spike and Matt and their teams, and technically the magic that Nico and his Beyond Sports team does to really bring this event to life.
I get asked pretty frequently how this has changed or how this has evolved since we’ve started doing animated alt-casts a couple of years ago. Two things really stick out to me that have dramatically altered what we’re able to bring to our audiences.
First, simply is the confidence and amazing collaboration with the creative execution from a world that began as watching animated versions of players play a game that was essentially the same. We’re now in a world where we have direct participation of the creative IP throughout almost all elements of the telecast, and Spike and Matt will get into that in more detail. But Simpsons characters integrated into the sidelines, the stadium, the game, and talking directly to our announcers and things of that nature.
Then the second piece, which is where we’ll really get to here with Nico, is the constant and rapid progress with the technology that, again, started with single point tracking just a couple of years ago and relatively basic movements to where we are today with blended tracking, the single-point NGS tracking combined with the Hawk-Eye tracking. And Nico will demonstrate some of this, but especially the constant evolutionary improvements that he’s able to make that continue to increase the level of detail.
And in terms of the collaboration of the IP and the technology continuing to grow together — and you can roll the first clip here, Courtney — we’re now in a world where not only are the Simpsons characters involved in the game, but they actually are with the Cowboys and with the Bengals and will come on and off and enter the game and remarkably can appear to be playing the game with real movements that are actually the same as the NFL players.
One final clip here, and, Nico, you can take it from here. Thank you.
NICO WESTERHOF: Thanks, Phil.
Our 3-D simulation is based on a positional tracking data, firstly. And like Phil is saying, we actually have two sources now coming together. We have the single-point tracking data that’s provided by NGS, which is active tracking. It’s trackers that are in the shoulder pads of the players. It’s a very stable feed that tells us exactly the position for a player. But it’s only the position, right? So we don’t know how the player is moving. We don’t know where he is facing. We don’t know what he is doing. We just know where he is.
Then the second data source is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data. And there we actually have 29 points per player so we can get a lot more closer to the actual character’s movement and the detailed movement that these characters have.
The single-point tracking, very stable, but just one point. Skeletal tracking, it’s a little bit less stable because of — it’s optical tracking. But when it works, you really want to use it as much as possible because it really provides that detail. So what we do at Beyond Sports is combine those two and take the best of both worlds so we deliver an experience to the viewer that is true to the action on the field.
I just want to show a couple of examples of that because we have a couple of data processing steps to go through before we can get to an end result.
Courtney, if you could start this video.
Yes. So, first, we look at single-point. This is without data processing. This is just the positions of the players and the ball. As you can see, the players don’t perform any specific movements. We just know where they are. But they don’t hold the ball. They don’t throw the ball. They don’t catch the ball. The ball is going over the crowd. As you can see, this is stable, but limited in terms of viewing experience.
The next step is we add contextual information to make the players move how we think they should move. So this is without the limb tracking data. This is just adding actions to the players to make sure that contextually it makes sense what they’re doing. As you can see, it’s still very generic. Everyone is running in the exact same way. Even though this becomes a viewable experience, it’s still generic.
So then we add skeletal tracking data where we can — and this is where it really becomes a special experience. Because now as you can see, on top of that stable simulation that we had, they are actually now moving in the same way as the players on the actual field were. So now we’re getting really close to the actual action.
Then the final step is, of course, like Phil was talking about, adding special characters. This takes a whole other level processing. We’ll use Lisa for an example. As she catches the ball, Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now with data processing we can actually take the ball, make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer it looks still believable, and it all makes sense.
And I think we had another slide on the VR commentator, but I’m not sure about that. Thank you.
So what I just explained was the basic simulation, the basis of this broadcast where we replicate the environment. And then how we’re telling the story to the viewer is something completely different.
So what we did is we actually made products for headset, Oculus Quest or Meta Quest Pro, that the commentators are wearing, and we actually transport the commentators — by wearing the headset, we transport them into the virtual world. So the commentators that will be providing the commentary on Monday’s broadcast, they will be wearing headsets, and we will actually be able to see them in the virtual world and occupying virtual world even to the point where they can go on to the field and be amongst the players.
So super exciting. That was it from my side.
OLIVIA CORYELL: Awesome. Thanks, Phil and Nico.
Before we move into Q&A, Spike and Matt will take us through some of the creative process, what it’s like working together, and then show us some more animations.
Spike, take it away.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Thanks.
Yeah, this has just been such a wonderful experience from top to bottom. Matt, I wanted to show you I did a little camera shot here change here. See how I’m helping to promote the Simpsons?
MATT SELMAN: Very good. Like it.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: I couldn’t get the whole logo made up, so I improvised.
MATT SELMAN: I think that’s amazing. Improvisation has been the spirit of this event.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Yeah. Matt has been great. He’s such a legend in the industry to work with. Our other partners, the NFL and Beyond Sports and the whole ESPN creative team, the fun about working on a project like this is that everybody wants to contribute, right? You ask an animator to make one animation, and they kick out four. We asked Matt and his team to write us three jokes, and they come up with 20.
Yesterday the technical crew was like on the floor hooking up stuff in the control room, like, lying on the dusty floor hooking everything up. Everybody wants this to be so great. Again, I would like to thank all the partners, including the NFL and Beyond Sports and all our ESPN marketing and synergy who helped out.
The real stars is the Simpsons. Matt can talk a little bit about how this all came about and how his team worked on the story line.
MATT SELMAN: Thanks, Spike.
Yeah, we’re just so lucky at the Simpsons to be able to do our dream job every day. To partner with NFL and ESPN — we’re such huge football fans — and the Simpsons audience and the football audience I feel are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and American culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun.
So when the Simpsons — we try to think of everything from a point of view of story and character, right? Even though it’s a sports game and we can’t control what happens and we can’t control a lot of it, we wanted to make sure that this alt-cast, this crazy situation where the Simpsons characters are playing — are in an NFL game with a million jokes in Springfield Atoms Stadium with Kang and Kodos and Krusty and Lisa and Mo and all these different NFL and ESPN celebrities.
Like, how did we make that make sense from a story and character point of view, right? Of course, the answer to that was, Homer eats too many hot dogs and has a dream while watching football. Once we locked in on that, it was just like off to the races, right? Right, Spike?
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to show you that clip right now.
MATT SELMAN: Here it comes.
(Video playing.)
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Off of that we go into our dream sequence. One of the big things, Matt, that I wanted to get out to everybody that’s tuned in — the media here today, it’s like unlike any of the other alt-casts we did — one thing I’d love to get across is that everybody watches — write this in please — watches from start to finish. Because we are telling a story. That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game.
It really is like a complete story and the NFL game, this great game, is going to happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises.
MATT SELMAN: Yeah, we were so lucky to be given the Cowboys versus the Bengals, who are just two iconic teams with great identities and great fan bases. We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine.
And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy — he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly.
If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching Monday Night Football, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville.
We would have found something. We would have made it work.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: When we sat down to do this — obviously so many people big fans of the Simpsons. It’s been around 35, 36 years now. So ultimately we just started to throw out crazy ideas, right? That was one of the most fun things about this. What could we have happen?
One of the things that came out is what if Marge asked the NFL players questions in Marge fashion, so let’s take a look at that.
(Video playing.)
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: So that wasn’t the clip I introduced. Marge does interview NFL players during the game, but that was another crazy idea where we have — our announce team are going to be interviewing during the game many of the Simpsons characters, including Bart, Homer, Mo, Chief Wiggum, Krusty. There’s going to be a lot of interviews with Simpsons characters during the game, so that was a clip of that.
Do you want to talk about how those ideas came about?
MATT SELMAN: Well, just, first of all, we were just — the fact that we have all the actual Simpsons voices to create original animation and content, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, and Hank Azaria — to have them on board to give this Simpsons reality and Simpsons authenticity, we couldn’t have done it without them.
Our voice talent is always excited to do these fun, new projects. Whether it’s a theme park ride or an NFL alt-cast, they know that the lifeblood of the Simpsons is replicating itself in whatever new technology comes along.
So I just want to thank our cast for being so up for the fun of this that Spike and his team — I mean, Spike and Sparky, as you can imagine, came into this with a huge energy of just fun and excitement and possibility and not wanting to limit ourselves. And just how can we be as creative and how can we be as Simpsony and how can we be as subversive and have as much fun as possible given the extreme budgetary and time restrictions we were under?
That’s just another one of the ways that this thing, I think, is going to deliver for the Simpsons fan and for the football fan, like, in a big way. It’s the real voices, the real characters with original comedy in both our animation and in the NFL football cool, CGI, realtime data-tracking, AI-stealing animation that it is.
I’m assuming this is stealing our data, right? I think you said something about that, Phil. Did you say that?
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: I think what’s really cool, what are you hitting on, is that there was a lot of late-night hours and a lot of late-night phone calls and back-and-forths in the early stuff and talking with so many people. Ultimately we do have 30 Simpsons characters that are going to be involved.
The Simpsons people have created seven new minutes of animation that you will never see anywhere else except during this game. That itself to me is gold. And a bunch of other crazy stuff, including our own ESPN talent. Drew Carter is going to be doing the game with Dan and Mina, and they’ve been wonderful.
We had to recreate them in Simpsons 3-D, which was another good leap of faith that we would love to thank the Simpsons for. They’re a 2-D animation show, and they trusted us with creating 3-D characters. That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job.
Back to our talent, so you’re going to see a lot. You already say Peyton and Eli. We told you about Drew, Dan, and Mina. Who doesn’t love a good old Stephen A. rant in the middle of Simpsons Funday Football?
(Video playing.)
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: That’s one of the wonderful things. That is Stephen A. delivery with the Simpsons writing.
MATT SELMAN: One take. He did it in one take.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: It’s just really cool. We’re really —
MATT SELMAN: We got to give a shout out, Spike, to Joel Cohen, the long-time Simpsons writer and super sports fan who did so much of the writing for this thing and really — you know, if Spike sent Joel an e-mail in the middle of the night saying we need 50 questions that Marge can ask to football players that won’t offend the NFL, Joel would write 100. It was really great.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Yeah, absolutely. Again, the NFL was great with helping us too in getting through stuff.
MATT SELMAN: Yeah.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: It was really fun. It really was fun. I hope that’s what really comes on the screen on Monday night. I think that’s really going to be what happens. We thank everybody for checking everything out. Matt, do you have any last words for people?
MATT SELMAN: Well, I am amazed to find out that Mina Kimes is a Simpsons nerd. That’s a big win. One of the beauties — I’ll repeat this, but one of the beauties of the Simpsons and football is that parents and their kids can watch something that they watched as a kid together as a family.
It’s a multi-generational experience that — it’s not like parents watching their kids to watch reruns or kids making their parents watch something new they don’t know what it is. It’s something that’s been part of their life for three generations now, and same with football.
The NFL and ESPN and Spike and everyone has allowed this crazy hot dog fever dream to happen, and all the ESPN talent that gave themselves, their time, including one very special spoiler guy that I will not mention — or girl. I just can’t wait to see people’s reaction.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Yeah, that’s very cool. All right, Olivia, we’re done. Thank you.
OLIVIA CORYELL: So great, guys. There really is nothing better than a Stephen A. rant, especially in the style of the Simpsons.
All right. Let’s go ahead and jump into Q&A with media. Joining us now is also Tim Reed, ESPN vice president of programming; Grace Senko, NFL vice president, media strategy and business development; Josh Helmrich, NFL senior director, Next Gen Stats; and Michael Markovich, Sony sports chief commercial officer. We still have Hans, Phil, Nico, Spike, and Matt.
- I was curious to know if — most of the other alt-casts have been really aimed at younger kids, Toy Story, Marvel. This is a little more — I would argue a little more adult and make fun of themselves. They’re a little more satirical. Does this give you some freedoms to go after a certain audience that you may not have to go after some of the younger kids with some of the more Disney IP?
TIM REED: I can jump in there. One of the filters we use in terms of thinking about which IPs to take a look at, the fact this game was in prime time was a big driver of that 8:00 kick. Last year we did Toy Story at 9:30 in the morning.
I think part of that filter was knowing we were in prime time, we’d go a little bit older. Again, I think this is — we were thinking more of like the older teen, whether that’s 13 to 17 here, but Matt hit on it earlier too. Clearly it’s multi-generational.
I’m a perfect example. I’m a die-hard Simpsons fan. I have been that way my whole life. I have 13- and 15-year-old boys who have been binge-watching all 35 episodes — 35 years of the Simpsons on Disney+.
Granted, they’re a focus group of two, but again, this is something we’re definitely going to enjoy together. So, again, I think that’s part of how we landed on the Simpsons and why this can work in this time.
MATT SELMAN: The Simpsons is not — we didn’t go maximum edgy for this, right? It’s not maximum edge, but there is a sense of playfulness and spoofiness of the NFL that I don’t think — that the NFL was unbelievably cool with — that I think where we’re having fun with the tropes of football and the cliches of football and making fun of the family-watching football experience in a way that these other shows wouldn’t really be able to do because they’re not — they don’t have satirical DNA.
I think we’re being incredibly playful with the spirit of football. Playfulness is part of the spirit of the show, and it came together very nicely.
HANS SCHROEDER: From the NFL perspective, when we first came to Disney a couple year ago and raised this idea that we thought this would be an interesting road to go down, Disney was the right partner because they owned such amazing and varied IP. They could tell stories to hundreds of different audiences.
I think — back to your core question, I think the Toy Story experience last year was incredible, and the Simpsons is going to be incredible too. It’s such a big, broad audience that the Simpsons speak to and bring in, as does the NFL, again, not only here domestically but globally.
I think we’ll continue to work with Disney, and we’ll learn a lot from this year. But at its core, inherently there’s such big audiences we are going to speak to. And to speak to them in a way where we’re bringing a new NFL experience, we’re really excited about.
For Hans and Grace, just what did you learn from last year’s Toy Story alt-cast because it was global distribution. And what is the evolution of kind of these things going global distribution, because not only do you have this alt broadcast, but you’ll have the Netflix games on Christmas too with a global audience. What have you seen internationally from doing this?
GRACE SENKO: Thanks, Joe. I think one of the things we also did last year and we’ll continue to do this year is in addition to the live airing on Disney+, we have made it available for 30 days on the platform. So there was a lot of consumption also just given the different time zones and otherwise in that post-live window.
So I think also as we look at the animated alt broadcasts, there just is kind of a longer shelf life especially — that will be enhanced this year with Spike and Matt’s help, and the ESPN side also with the unique Simpsons content that will be filtered throughout. So I think we’ve just seen a lot of demand for that even after the live airing.
But then more broadly, I think what we’ve been working with the ESPN and Simpsons team on is also thinking about ways that we can make sure that we’re giving a nod to those different viewers that are tuning in from around the world. I think there’s a blimp that will have different flags with music that will kind of allow those viewers to feel like they are being seen and heard within the broadcast, which is really exciting.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Not just any blimp, Duff’s blimp. Duff’s blimps is one of the fun vehicles that’s going to serve as a Jumbotron in the sky for all kinds of stuff, maybe even with an appearance by the Duffman, so…
HANS SCHROEDER: I would add that at its core the game is the canvas. But as you heard from all the incredibly talented people that are going to tell the story, the story is even less about the game. It’s more like a movie. It’s telling the story of a football game in just a different way.
The Toy Story example proves again true here. My daughter, who is 5, watched it more like she would Frozen or anything else animated and different. She came back and wants to watch it again and again.
For us in the NFL, it’s a different way to tell the story about the sport we love with the canvas still being the game, but such great, incredible, creative talents here just completely expressing it in a different way. And when we think about reaching some of the parts of the fan base, whether they’re here or internationally, the ability to expand how we reach them and tell it in a different way at different windows on different platforms like Disney+ at different times.
Like Grace said, that it’s available for 30 days to come and watch whenever they want to watch it, those are all learning points that we picked up on from last year. And I think we’ll continue to learn from what we do here with the Simpsons. But at its core, to me, it’s just an entirely different way and almost different type of content with how to enjoy the NFL, but enjoy it through a Simpsons lens, which is so cool.
MATT SELMAN: Right, because no sport more so than football has epic narratives over the course of a season, right? Because you have this great weekly structure of games.
Football narratives dominate the American mindscape in a way like nothing else. And I want to be so — the spirit of the Simpsons from Matt Groening and James L. Brooks, our creator, is always narrative, narrative, narrative, story, story, story.
And like you guys were saying, there is a story to this game. We don’t know who is going to win, but it is Bart versus Homer, father versus son. Like this iconic thing that everybody knows. Even if you have never watched the Simpsons, you know that Bart strangles Homer, right? Whoops, Homer strangles Bart. I should watch the show.
That is in this game. It is about story. It is about narrative. It’s the spirit of football and it’s the spirit of the Simpsons. Whoever they partner with next, I think you can’t do it this good. I hate to be negative. I just don’t know how you’re going to top this. I don’t know. Maybe you should just quit. Maybe this should be the last one. Should we announce that?
OLIVIA CORYELL: It’s important to be confident, Matt.
MATT SELMAN: They can do it. They can do it.
I know it was mentioned that this project has been in the making for almost a year. My question is, when did you guys find out what game the simulcast would be assigned to, and what that turnaround was like getting the graphics ready for the teams?
MATT SELMAN: Every day was a push to us.
HANS SCHROEDER: Grace, why don’t you jump in?
GRACE SENKO: I think that was around September or so, if not earlier, Tim. We definitely had a longer runway this year than we did last year.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Yeah, the runway was longer, but definitely more content and more to play with. It’s a long process from where the idea starts. And then by the time you sort of get everything up and running from a graphics preparation, it’s a pretty — it’s like a sprint for like two and a half months where we’re really all working together. And we’ll meet with the Simpsons and then go meet with the NFL and then we’ll meet with the — and we’ll come back and forth and just trying to really get everything right.
You know, you come to that point where you want to go, okay, now we have all of our ideas. We want to start to build. But, of course, new ideas come in as you’re going. So it’s not a small task. But, again, everybody enjoys doing it so much that by the time we get to today, we’re all just psyched to do it. People would have been building more stuff if we didn’t say stop.
MATT SELMAN: I would compare it to the arc of the Movie “Stepbrothers”. Spike and I are John C. Reillyand Will Ferrell.
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Which one am I?
MATT SELMAN: You’re John C. Reilly definitely.
Guys, Monday is the Catalina Wine Mixer. It’s all happening. It’s all going down at the wine mixer.
TIM REED: We did use it to our advantage that the game was in December, though.
HANS SCHROEDER: The game was in December, and if you are asking from a Cincinnati perspective, I think from our view, this is one of the sort of real big tent pole games on the Monday Night Football calendar with sort of where the Bengals and Joe Burrow have been, and with Dallas and sort of the franchise that they have.
I think the creative talent in here would tell a story about — no matter what two teams played, would find great stories and narratives to play. But this year, particularly this matchup and sort of how it translated back to the Simpsons and being such a tent pole game on the overall Monday night calendar, was one I think we circled as having a lot of excitement around it.
Nico, first question for you, and then obviously for Spike and maybe Phil, the second question, think about any technology advances that have made these shows easier to do since the last one. But also for Nico, you mentioned this Lisa Simpson and the ball being adjusted in the air so she could catch it. That sounds kind of complicated and difficult to do in realtime. How has that been accomplished? What was involved in terms of coding and making that happen?
NICO WESTERHOF: Thank you. It is difficult to do, especially in realtime. There is a whole bunch of different processes going on in the background on our side, data processing processes, mostly machine learning processes. It really needs to be adjusted on the fly as we don’t know beforehand what character is going to be in what play.
So it needs to be very flexible, the system. We spent a lot of time on making it as flexible as possible because we don’t know what’s going to happen.
Then Spike, have there been any technology advancements to make this whole project easier?
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Phil is really the technical side on this for us, but I am just amazed that when we look at the game play and we watch it — and we’re always making suggestions — and I’ll look at Phil and I’ll say, are we going to get there? Phil will look at me and go, Oh, Nico is going to handle it. That’s my technical explanation. Phil, you might want to —
MICHAEL SZYKOWNY: Look, I love sharing a little bit of understanding of Nico’s progress, but when you get to the machine learning and how to make those compensations, it’s way, way beyond my capability to really dig into that.
To Spike’s point, I mean, I hope I’m smart enough to know the right people to do the hardest jobs, and that’s the way I look at Nico, and that’s the way I look at the Beyond Sports team.
It’s going to get done to the best it can be done, and the day I see somebody else who can handle the kind of things you’re asking about — because I have seen other forms of this type of interpretation of data into animated game action, whether it’s cartoon-related or actual avatars and players. It’s a really, really challenging, hard business. And I respect all the people who are making progress in that business. But when I see anybody do it as well as Nico and Beyond Sports, I’ll believe it when I see it that day.
The last thing, just to answer your question about technical evolution, obviously we’ve talked about the evolutions of the game play, but Nico touched a little bit about the VR headset. I wanted to elaborate on that a little bit.
After Toy Story last year, we moved to where we have the talent actually calling the game and immersed in the game wearing a Meta Pro VR headset. There are a few experiences — even just yesterday when we started getting in the control room and people who have been on the project who haven’t been on it before — they go over and put the headset on, and it’s like, Damn. It feels so real to the scene.
Obviously it’s an animated scene with animated stadium in Springfield. Then once you’re in that VR headset, I can’t tell you how many conversations we’ve had with Mina, Dan, and Drew Carter, like, How will I know when the other person wants to talk if we’re not going to be — if we’re going to be isolated in a VR headset?
It’s, like, you’re going to think — Dan, you’re going to think that Drew is two feet to your left, and you’re going to think that Mina is two feet to your right as an animated Simpsons character. You’re going to be wherever you want to be. You can be on the sideline at Mo’s juice bar. You can be on the middle of the field. It will feel —
MATT SELMAN: Mo’s famous juice bar. Everyone knows Mo sells juice.
PHIL ORLINS: Special juice.
MATT SELMAN: Doesn’t sell anything else.
PHIL ORLINS: It’s amazing. It also has allowed us to do other things like we did with hockey that we’ll do again with football where we can actually — we can actually take an immersed Dan Orlovsky and drop him right on to the field with the replay and have him stand next to the quarterback and see him there, and he feels like he’s looking at Cooper Rush or whoever it is, Joe Burrow, and talking about seeing what he is seeing and talking about what he is seeing.
The potential and capability of that technology and our ability to immerse the talent fully in the scene has really opened up a lot of doors for us.
OLIVIA CORYELL: While we’re on the topic of tech, Michael, would you be open to talking a little bit about how Hawk-Eye fits into all of this from a Sony point of view and then, Josh, if you want to talk did about Next Gen Stats a little bit too?
MICHAEL MARKOVICH: Thanks, Olivia.
I think the exciting thing is it’s not even just Beyond Sports or Hawk-Eye, but also the Sony relationship. Sony announced the broader technical partnership with the NFL back in the summer. Now we’re looking at ways to unlock across all the businesses.
This is a really good example. From a Hawk-Eye perspective, the more data we capture, the better it gets and then the more use cases we can actually deliver from it. Of course, our number one focus of the Hawk-Eye side of things is use the optical tracking data and start to advance the officiating and really get to what we hope with the journey with the NFL and many other sports is Next Gen officiating.
At the same time, with the NFL and others we want to create new assets. So as this data gets better and the systems get better and we have more reps and trials of this, then obviously you get to do things like the Simpsons game and the Toy Story game and hopefully even more serialized or episodic media content.
I think Hans and Grace said it well, how do you tell this story and then how do you make this more of a common thing? What’s the halo around it?
As part of Sony and Hawk-Eye and Beyond Sports, we’re obviously thrilled to be a part of it.
JOSH HELMRICH: I think Hans said it at the top. We always had this vision when we started player-involved tracking, which is what — we’ve given the name 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.
So with Nico and the Beyond Sports team and combining it with the Hawk-Eye data, we’ve really been able to elevate it and take it to the next level. Last year was a great example of it. We use our data to do other alt broadcasts. The more creative and engaging content we can create, the better. We just continue to grow thanks to great partners like ESPN and Beyond Sports.
Hans, I was wondering from your perspective, this is the second alternate broadcast that you guys are doing with Disney under this current rights deal. What is the added value to working with the company that has all of that additional IP to outside of the sports genre?
HANS SCHROEDER: I think we can take a step back for a second. We are big believers that there are different ways to tell incredible stories around our game. We’re fortunate to have partners that are the best at what they do and producing the core experience that 20 million fans watch every week. But how do we tell unique stories on top of that?
ESPN really has led the way with what they did with the ManningCast as one of the truly unique, innovative alternative broadcasts, but we’ve seen other partners add to that now. We have Prime Vision with Amazon, which is a great way to tell for the really football-focused fan a more insightful view. We did Toy Story last year.
So each of these, I think, for us, the core is does it have a purpose? Is it trying to solve a specific or create a specific viewing opportunity that’s unique, distinct, and compelling? Once we sort of get around that, then we think there’s a lot there that we can bring to life.
What we talked about already with the Toy Story or certainly with the Simpsons — that animated view, that world of bringing our content into an ecosystem, as somebody said it earlier — where there’s already millions and millions of Simpsons fans out there that we can reach both domestically but also globally. In some cases we’re going to be tapping into Simpsons fans that maybe haven’t watched football as much, hoping that they’ll become football fans coming out of it.
We’ll tap into some Simpsons fans that are die-hard NFL fans already and are just going to love seeing Bart and Homer in that environment. So for us we think about that combination of getting into the screens and the platforms where our fans are spending time. Clearly digital is the growth area. Disney+ is a robust area with the millions and millions of subscribers they have. To bring an NFL experience into that environment that’s new and different is incredibly exciting. To go into borders and across borders in a different way, to go into time zones and to time periods that we don’t typically offer our content in.
All those are for us tremendous opportunities to engage, to learn, and hopefully for our fans to give them new experiences that will inform what we do going forward.
This is part of an overall approach where we’ve been very focused and deliberate on, but it’s probably one of the biggest steps forward we’ve taken into that initiative. Again, as you’ve heard me say several times, the work and the talent, what you’re hearing from this collective group to bring this to life, Monday night is going to be pretty awesome. It’s going to be pretty fun to see it come to life.
I have a question for Phil. I know you have worked on a lot of different alternate broadcasts. This year alone you’ve talked about the Statcast alternate for Sunday Night Baseball and the KidsCast. I’m wondering, what carries over from those other alternate broadcasts, and what specifically is different about this one?
PHIL ORLINS: I think this is the most alternate of the alternate broadcasts, if that makes any sense at all. Most of what we’re doing is finding a different way to reach fans of a game. To me this is the true alternative because we are really — we’re not just treating the game or wrapping it with an alteration. We’re actually recreating the game in a truly alternative universe. By design when we do that, we’re now explicitly pursuing the interest of fans who may not want to watch the game in the conventional manner.
I think it’s really important. All the alternatives we do engage people. We keep them longer. We find a few — we find some new viewers. It’s always very hard to identify exactly how many of those viewers are actually new viewers, and how many are going to hit the game in a different manner.
Whereas this is truly the alternative — whether it’s Toy Story where we’re maybe pursuing preteens co-viewing with their parents or this where we’re maybe looking at parents and teens co-viewing, we’re really pushing for a different group of viewers.
I think if you really look — I don’t want to dive too deep into the numbers. I don’t have them memorized. When you look at the amount of people who watch Toy Story on Disney+ rather than ESPN+ — which is a huge, huge majority of the Toy Story audience that found it on the Disney+ outlet — you realize you are truly reaching different viewers than you would be otherwise.
I think that’s really important. I think Hans alluded to this earlier. It’s really important to the sport as well. We all would love for young people to start engaging and watching sporting events in their entirety in their preteen years, but we know how realistically challenging it is nowadays with all the forms of media that are out there. So to have a way to get younger or different viewers to really want to engage for a full game or a substantial part of the game is really a lofty, lofty goal. And I think these are designed to attack that in a way that no other alt-cast does.
OLIVIA CORYELL: I think we’re wrapped with Q&A. We are going to go ahead and show the game play clip from earlier just one more time because I feel like people are wanting to see that.
Courtney will cue that up, and I’ll give a little spiel to end us.
(Video playing.)
OLIVIA CORYELL: Much to look forward to for Monday. Thanks to all the media for joining us and all of our speakers.
If you have any further questions or would like to set up additional time with any of these folks, please reach out to Derek or myself. Have a great weekend and enjoy the Simpsons Funday Football this Monday on Disney+ and ESPN+.
Media Contacts:
Derek Volner ([email protected])
Lily Blum ([email protected])
