Spalk will offer
Spalk will offer now offer French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Italian broadcasts for NFL Game Pass. SPALK
Spalk, a cloud-based commentary and tech platform scaling multilingual commentary for teams, leagues and broadcast partners, is expanding its language offerings abroad for select NBA and NFL games. The NBA deal comes through a pact with Prime Video, as Amazon has the league’s international streaming rights. Spalk will offer the first remote broadcasts in seven languages for the NBA Friday doubleheaders on Prime Video, including Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian and Korean. The European offerings could help draw NBA fans as the league will soon have more concrete plans for expansion on the continent (Spalk also has done deals with EuroLeague teams, as well as the entire Greek domestic league).
For NFL games, a deal completed through the league and DAZN (its international streaming partner for NFL Game Pass), Spalk is now delivering broadcasts in French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Italian as the league continues to grow out its Global Markets program.
“We’re like an enterprise technology that sits in the background and makes it really easy to produce these games without flying people around,” said Spalk co-founder & CEO Ben Reynolds. “F1’s been another really cool one to be a part of. This year, we’re doing the U.S. domestic Spanish broadcast for Apple TV. And they’ve got broadcasters all across the U.S. and Mexico who are able to just open up a laptop at home, play by the headset with a microphone and broadcast as if they’re at the venue. And then in the background, where our technology does all the heavy lifting of synchronizing, mixing, all those kind of things to make sure that when you’re watching, you shouldn’t be able to tell that those announcers are not in the venue.”
Spalk, which launched seven years ago, hires the talent for all of its language offerings, as it maintains a database of announcers, analysts and influencers around the globe (for NFL games, the league provides around 80% of talent). “We’re not a full-on talent agency, but we definitely think of ourselves as a talent marketplace,” said Reynolds.
This month, Spalk will have over 5,500 announcers on its roster in 52 languages, the latest of which is Mongolian. In soccer, the European Football Season is using Spalk to produce multilingual coverage across the Premier League, Serie A, LaLiga, Bundesliga and Ligue 1, which includes production in Spanish, English, French, German and Italian.