The Walt Disney Company has launched an around-the-clock content stream that offers marathon viewing of the hit animated sitcom “The Simpsons” on its streaming platform Disney Plus.
The 24-hour stream will offer non-stop episodes of The Simpsons pulled from the show’s catalog of 767 episodes across 35 seasons. In a press release on Tuesday, Disney said the content stream will offer “nearly 300 continuous hours with the Simpsons family.”
“From day one, the fans have asked for a stream of The Simpsons, and we’re happy to oblige,” Gabe Lewis, the Senior Vice President of Programming and Content Curation at Disney Plus, said in a statement. “
“Streams on Disney Plus have been a fantastic go-to experience for subscribers looking to sit back and relax with their favorite shows and movies, and we look forward to evolving the user experience and expanding the offering with more streams, to more subscribers, later this year,” Lewis noted.
The Simpsons began as short animated interstitials on the sketch comedy program “The Tracey Ullman Show,” one of the first programs aired on the fledgling Fox network in the late 1980s.
The shorts found an audience, and Fox quickly green-lit a standalone show based on the characters of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. It debuted in 1989 with an ensemble cast of characters from the fictitious town of Springfield, and became Fox’s first hit series.
Throughout much of its early history, The Simpsons was relegated exclusively to broadcast TV, with 21st Century Fox offering home video releases on VHS and DVD. A full-length motion picture — “The Simpsons Movie” — was produced in 2007, and the series entered cable syndication on FXX in 2014.
All episodes of The Simpsons were initially available to stream through the FX Now app, which required a cable or satellite TV subscription to access. The show was acquired by Disney through its purchase of certain Fox TV and film assets in 2017, and moved to Disney Plus on an exclusive basis after the streaming service launched in 2019.
Disney originally presented The Simpsons with a 16-by-9 aspect ratio, cropped to fill the screen on high-definition TV sets, but an outcry by Simpsons fans convinced Disney to release early episodes of the show in their original aspect ratio. Today, Disney Plus subscribers can choose between the original aspect ratio or the enhanced high-definition version of early episodes. Newer episodes of The Simpsons are produced in widescreen high definition only.
The 24-hour content stream appears to honor the request of Disney Plus streamers based on their preferred aspect ratio, according to a test of the stream by The Desk on Tuesday. The Simpsons channel joins a growing roster of other linear content streams, including Disney Playtime, Real Life, Throwbacks, Hits & Heroes and a simulcast of ABC News Live.
