Bringing New Aspects of “The Simpsons” to Disney+
The Simpsons has entertained millions with lighthearted takes on cultural and technological changes and shifts within its gags and storylines across thousands of episodes over the past 30 years (and counting). On the other side of the screen, technology advancements in video have changed the very ways in which the series is produced and presented, providing an interesting challenge when it comes to presenting that content today.
This post describes that challenge, along with the approach that was taken to bring more great The Simpsons content to Disney+.
The Simpsons first premiered in 1989, back in the days of analog television when TVs were standard definition with a 4:3 aspect ratio, and The Simpsons was produced in an SD 4:3 format. As high definition technology became more prevalent (and affordable), The Simpsons adopted HD, which also meant a change to the wider, more rectangular 16:9 aspect ratio typical of HD. (The switch to HD occurred during the middle of the 20th season, in 2009.)
Most displays sold today are 16:9 HD, so those early episodes were remastered for HD, which made for a great, screen-filling presentation, but meant re-framing the content, cropping out the top and bottom of the original frames.
The cropping yields the side-effect of excluding visual context from some scenes, limiting the impact of some funny sight gags:
Bringing Both Versions to Disney+
While all episodes in the series were initially provided on Disney+ in 16:9, the goal was to provide both the original 4:3 aspect ratio and the 16:9 versions, providing a choice as to which format to watch, especially for our super fans.
The best user experience would be achieved by treating 4:3 and 16:9 versions equally, supporting all Disney+ product features and content interaction mechanisms, while adding a new app feature — choice of aspect ratio.
Existing features including Continue Watching, Watchlists, and the ability to binge by auto-playing episodes in sequential order had to be maintained regardless of the current aspect ratio mode. (Given those features wouldn’t be supported were the 4:3 versions to be added as standalone bonus content, that option was discarded.)
Efficiency was another goal. Thousands of audio and subtitle components were already live for the 428 episodes existing in both 4:3 and 16:9, along with episode-specific artwork and metadata — none of which differed between the different aspect ratios. The audiovisual content is temporally identical between 4:3 and 16:9 versions, hence re-using all of those existing components meant an opportunity to avoid the redundancy of delivering, processing, QC’ing, and storing copies of thousands of assets that were already live and actively in use on Disney+.
Before getting into the solution, a brief overview of how content is modeled is called for.
What is Content?
A content package consists of audiovisual components (video, various audio languages and formats, subtitles) and both functional and display metadata (artwork, title, description, credits, etc.). This generally means dozens of related assets for each episode, all of which must be identified for tracking as they make their way from Springfield to your town.
Content is pinned to unique identifiers called EIDR IDs, which represent the underlying creative work and its corresponding audiovisual editions. These IDs are a standard within the media & entertainment industry and are administered by the non-profit Entertainment Identifier Registry Association.
The EIDR is used not only to reference the audiovisual content and related art and metadata, but also to link associated rights and scheduling information that dictate where and when the content can be made available. (This can vary from territory to territory given specifics of content licensing.)
Before the content can be ingested and processed by Disney Streaming Services (DSS), it has to be packaged for delivery by our partners in Studio Operations. This packaging process makes use of another industry standard, the MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework (MDDF), which defines the methods for representing content assets and associated metadata so they can be understood by our media pipeline. You can think of MDDF as a set of instructions that dictate how the content ultimately drives the playback experience on Disney+.
An inherent assumption in the existing content model was that the video edit would be singular and unique. While multiple audio or subtitle components could be associated, the video would be the anchor for the EIDR ID.
Facets of a Solution
The DSS team was excited by the opportunity to identify and challenge assumptions, and after reviewing the pros and cons of approaches involving multiple EIDRs and creating complex relationships between them, it was clear that the cleanest path forward was to make a fundamental change to the content model to break the assumption that only a single version of video would be present in any given package.
The concept of multiple media “facets,” or flexible combinations of audio, video, and subtitle components, was introduced. Components delivered under a common EIDR can now be grouped in multiple combinations, providing the capability to re-use existing assets, and laying the groundwork to support a user preference for aspect ratio preference while maintaining existing content interaction features.
The MovieLabs Digital Distribution Framework (MDDF) is a suite of standards and specifications created with the goal of achieving digital supply chain automation between content providers and the platforms that stream content to customers. The approach to support “facets” involved migrating our supply chain to the latest version of the Media Manifest Core (MMC) specification in order to leverage a new subType data field, which signals the additional aspect ratio.
With the changes, the package now looks like this, containing both video formats:
From that, two facets are derived for use within the Disney+ ecosystem:
Those facets share common elements, with 4:3 video being additive to existing subtitles and audio. Clients were updated to provide a new UI control to indicate the aspect ratio preference, and request the appropriate facet based on that setting. Regardless of chosen aspect ratio, Continue Watching and autoplay of the next episode behave as expected.
Building for the Future
This was a fascinating challenge to meet. The new concept of facets efficiently supports new types of content presentations on Disney+, opening up exciting opportunities for novel ways of presenting content in the future.
