The NFL has announced plans to take a Monday Night Football game into the world of Simpsons in real-time for the second edition of ESPN’s Funday Football.
This initiative will see the NFL, Disney, The Simpsons and Sony collaborate to take the match between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys into the cartoon world of The Simpsons, which will stream live 9 December.
Using Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology, players from both teams will be turned into animated characters. Additionally, iconic characters from the television show will also be seen throughout the broadcast, interviewing players and taking part in the match themselves for selected periods.
The creators of The Simpsons have worked with other entities to ensure the production looks, sounds and feels like an authentic presentation of the show. This includes written segments featuring analysts Stephen A. Smith and Peyton and Eli Manning, who will appear in the coverage, as well as having its own commentary team.
Audiences can tune into this Simpsons experience through streams on Disney+ and ESPN+, as well as on mobile via NFL+. Whereas, ESPN, ABC and ESPN Deportes will provide viewers the chance to watch the traditional broadcast of the match.
Internationally, the presentation will be available in more than 145 markets live and/or via replay. These markets include Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sub-Saharan Africa and Canada.
As mentioned above, this is the second edition of ESPN’s Funday Football, with the last time being the broadcaster’s first fully-animated NFL telecast. Last year’s coverage won multiple awards and delivered the biggest live event to date on Disney+, in terms of peak concurrency.
Last week, Netflix announced that it had sold all of its available in-game ad inventory for its two upcoming NFL games on Christmas Day. For these two games, FanDuel will be the exclusive pregame sportsbook partner.
This will see the betting firm, which has a partnership with the NFL and several teams in the league, sponsor an in-game show and have the chance for additional exposure through traditional ads featured throughout the coverage.
