NFL Playoffs 2025: CBS Sports and Nickelodeon Go Beyond SpongeBob Universe, Boost AR Technology With Latest Slime-Filled Altcast

NFL Playoffs 2025: CBS Sports and Nickelodeon Go Beyond SpongeBob Universe, Boost AR Technology With Latest Slime-Filled Altcast AR graphics for Saturday's Chargers-Texans alternate presentation are once again being driven by Silver Spoon Animation By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Friday, January 10, 2025 - 4:04 pm

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Nickelodeon and CBS Sports are set to produce their sixth Slime-filled alternate NFL telecast this weekend with NFL Wild Card Game Live from Bikini Bottom. And Saturday's SpongeBob SquarePants-themed presentation of the Chargers-Texans matchup will serve as a tribute to just how far these AR-graphics-fueled broadcasts have come - both the technologically and creatively - since the first Nickelodeon altcast of an NFL game back in 2021.

You always want to top what you did the last time around; that's for sure, says CBS Sports' Shawn Robbins, who will once again serve as coordinating producer of the game. Our primary goals this time around are to bring in more characters than ever before and to push the technology further than we ever have before.

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More Characters Means More Fun: Upping the Ante After Super Bowl LVIII The sixth family-friendly collaboration of an NFL game - and third NFL Wild Card game - between CBS Sports and Nickelodeon follows up Super Bowl LVIII Live from Bikini Bottom, which won a Sports Emmy Award and marked the first-ever altcast for a Super Bowl.

In an effort to up the ante for this outing, the Nickelodeon broadcast will include appearances by fan-favorite characters from across Paramount's portfolio beyond just the SpongeBob SquarePants universe, including Transformers, Hey Arnold!, CatDog, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Loud House, The Tiny Chef Show, The Faily OddParents, Rugrats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more.

We genuinely felt we hit a home run on the Super Bowl, but there is always room for improvement, says Robbins. We achieved our goals, got in everything we wanted to do, so we immediately started thinking about what we could do to give it a bigger feel. The SpongeBob universe is phenomenal, but there's a whole big world of Nickelodeon [IP] that we didn't really touch on in the previous games. So that's what we're bringing to this game. There will be some surprises and Nickelodeon characters you weren't expecting to see.

Silver Spoon Animation is once again at the center of the production, running eight Unreal 5.4 Engines from Pixotope (with redundant backups) to drive the augmented reality graphics operation. Three different camera-tracking technologies are being leveraged for the production: G3DVu, SMT, and Stype.

There is no better moment that show the power of augmented reality for sports TV than in situations like this where it is actually part of the storytelling, says Jason Cohen, SVP, Remote Technical Operations, CBS Sports. It isn't just there for eye candy; it's actually there to move the story ahead.

Earlier this week, A Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) scan of NRG Stadium in Houston to provide Silver Spoon with the 3D mesh model that will serve as the canvas for Saturday's presentation. Unlike at Super Bowl LVIII, when the scan was done weeks in advance, the Lidar scan could not be performed until the Playoff rankings became official following last week's regular season finale.

For the Super Bowl, we knew the venue way in advance and then we had two weeks to prepare once we knew who the teams would be; but for Wild Card, we not only have to find out the teams but also the venue and we have less than a week to prepare since it's a Saturday game, says Robbins. So the technical challenges have been a lot greater this week, especially since we've upped production. Yes, we did two Wild Card games in the past - New Orleans and Dallas - where we found out the week of the game, but now that we've raised the bar in terms of the production it's an even bigger lift.

On-Site in Houston: Side-by-Side Trucks in the Compound and Real/Animated Announcers in the Booth The Nickelodeon effort will be a side-by-side broadcast from separate trucks - Game Creek Video's Peacock A & B units along with its Edit 1 truck - alongside the main CBS trucks (NEP's Supershooter 4).

The Nickelodeon broadcast will have nine of its owned manned cameras as well as access to more than a dozen camera feeds from main CBS broadcast.

Doing a regular game or a fully animated game is very different compared when you're meshing those worlds together, says Cohen. We are mixing and matching regular game coverage with the animated portion. That means you have to ensure the normal coverage plan for an NFL game in terms super slow motion and all the right angles like low and high end-zone cameras. And then you have to layer in the extra components that are required to bring the AR to life. It's a complicated dance.

Robbins adds: What's really interesting about this time around is that we've raised the bar as far as level of difficulty goes, says Robbins. You're going to see a lot of cases where it will be a switcher effect from TD right into an EVS tape roll and then into an AR effect. So a lot of sequences that you'll see in this broadcast are three different technologies happening in a span of just a few seconds. That's something we wouldn't have even considered in the early days of these [alternate broadcasts].

Following their debut in Super Bowl LVIII Live from Bikini Bottom, an animated SpongeBob SquarePants (voiced by Tom Kenny) and Patrick Star (voiced by Bill Fagerbakke) will reprise their roles in the virtual booth alongside CBS Sports analyst Nate Burleson. Meanwhile, Sandy Cheek

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/01/10/nfl-playoffs-2025-cbs-sports-an...
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