Silver Spoon develops a CBS Sport Christmas Day 2022 simulcast on Nickelodeon with AI and AR technology

Silver Spoon is a studio that creates real-time content and experiences in its own virtual production platform created with Unreal Engine technology.

This enterprise has announced that, recently, they have created an immersive viewing experience for the “kidfriendly” simulcast of CBS Sports’ Christmas Day 2022 game on the Nickelodeon network.

The Christmas Day 2022 was the network’s third simulcast designed to bring generations of football fans together. The idea with this “kid-friendly” experience was to move the boundaries even further.

The studio augmented the action on the field with mixed-reality effects and holiday-themed characters, including Santa Claus, a crew of mischievous snowballs, a giant Yeti who constantly wreaked havoc during the game, and, of course, the famous Nickelodeon slime.

To achieve it, Silver Spoon combined artificial intelligence live AR graphics and mixed reality in a live broadcast. Studio’s virtual production platform for the game utilized Unreal Engine and Pixotope for real-time rendering and compositing.

“This broadcast clearly demonstrated producers are not constricted to a floating graphic on the screen,” said Dan Pack, Managing Director at Silver Spoon. “You can do anything anywhere to add several layers of entertainment to an existing broadcast. There are so many ways to use AR to complement and enhance what’s happening in the game, and with the degree of graphics control we can give operators, the viewer has no idea what’s coming next.”

“The show directors and the creative team from Nickelodeon were all involved with us from the beginning,” said Laura Herzing, Executive Producer at Silver Spoon. “All the creative was developed in a way that the directors knew what was being included and were able to give input on how it would fit into a broadcast. This end-to-end collaborative process helped us achieve our goals of creating narrative storytelling, adding unexpected delights for the viewer, and pushing technological boundaries like never before.” 