ESPN and Beyond Sports agreed to a partnership extension of at least two years that will include new animated altcasts for the NFL, NBA, NHL, and, for the first time, the WNBA, according to Sports Business Journal.
The deal runs through the 2026-27 sports calendar year and builds on a collaboration that started with the NHL Big City Greens Classic in 2023. Since then, ESPN has rolled out two Funday Football broadcasts for the NFL — one featuring “Toy Story” characters and another with “The Simpsons” — along with the NBA’s Dunk the Halls on Christmas Day featuring Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters.
The upcoming WNBA altcast marks the first animated broadcast for professional women’s sports, though ESPN hasn’t announced specific dates or which cartoon IP it will use.
Beyond Sports uses Sony’s Hawk-Eye tracking technology to render live game action in real-time, often adding wearable sensor data for increased accuracy. The company can transpose any licensed IP onto the field, court, or ice while the game is happening.
ESPN and Beyond Sports executives have repeatedly framed these productions as tools to attract younger audiences. Beyond Sports CEO Sander Schouten told SBJ last November that “if you get them before they turn 14, you have a chance to get them for life.” He pointed to declining youth engagement with sports as a “future problem” for leagues if they don’t act.
The results so far don’t paint a clear picture. Most of these altcasts air exclusively on Disney+ and ESPN+, so the numbers don’t get released publicly. ESPN said Toy Story Funday Football delivered “the biggest live event to date on Disney+” based on peak concurrency, but didn’t provide actual figures. The broadcast, however, won three Sports Emmys.
Dunk the Halls aired on ESPN2, Disney+, and ESPN+ while the traditional broadcast ran on ABC and drew 4.91 million viewers. ESPN didn’t break out the animated version’s numbers separately.
The only altcast with public viewership data has been Nickelodeon’s NFL broadcasts. The 2021 debut drew over 2 million viewers. A Wild Card game in 2022 averaged 1.3 million. By Christmas 2023, that number had dropped to 900,000.
The productions require significant resources. “The Simpsons” Funday Football took nearly a year to produce and required so much pre-recorded content that it made the Monday Night Football game ineligible for flexing. That left ESPN stuck with a Cowboys-Bengals matchup that looked far less appealing by December than it did when originally scheduled.
ESPN’s moving forward with more anyway. The two-year extension guarantees altcasts will continue across all four major properties, with the WNBA set to get its first animated broadcast before the deal expires in 2027.