NEW YORK – (Staff Report from Official News Release) – Spalk, a cloud-based commentary and technology platform scaling multilingual commentary for teams, leagues and broadcast partners, announced its largest North American sports expansion, adding more non-English global partnerships with the NFL and the NBA as the fall progresses. The NBA expansion will include the first-ever remote broadcasts in seven languages for NBA on Prime, while the NFL expansion now includes live commentary in five additional languages never offered before.
“We have come a long way from launching the business in a New Zealand dorm room in 2015, and there is no better proof of concept than what we are now doing with a growing number of North American leagues, particularly the NFL and the NBA,” said Ben Reynolds Co-founder and CEO at Spalk. “The best way to reach consumers and make them fans on a global level is to give them the excitement of the live event in their own language, and we have refined the technology so that delivery, consistency and professionalism of talent is at a premium. By employing the largest group of multilingual talent literally everywhere in the world, we can assure that the leagues, our growing list of broadcast partners and most importantly the fans, are literally being heard and enjoying real-time multilingual broadcasts every day, with more to come.”
This coming season, Spalk will provide NBA broadcasts in Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian and Korean using their qualifying list of talent. For NBA on Prime, coverage will cover Friday doubleheaders with 28 different commentators on one night across the two games. Twice this season there will be a triple header broadcast. That will have 42 commentators in one day across three games. For the NFL, Spalk is now delivering broadcasts in French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Italian, a clear reflection of the global growth of the league.
Through the agreements, Spalk will provide its proprietary cloud-based streaming and AI-powered production technology to support enhanced live game coverage, multilingual commentary capabilities, and deeper fan interaction across digital platforms as well as remote real-time commentary in languages that the properties were not able to offer before. This month, Spalk will have over 5,500 announcers on their roster in 52 languages, the latest of which is Mongolian, which will be heard covering the Japanese basketball championships (in English and Spanish as well).
The 2026-27 season is the first European Football Season where Spalk is being used to produce multilingual coverage across all of the top five leagues in Europe (EPL, Serie A, LaLiga, Bundesliga & Ligue 1), which includes production in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian for various rights holders around the world. Recent highlights include producing commentary in 22 languages of coverage on the 2026 FIFA World Cup and 2026 being the first year Spalk has localized coverage for marquee properties like the Tour de France, the NBA and F1.
Broadcasters using Spalk’s Virtual Commentary Studio report savings of up to 85% compared with on-site production, which has helped make localized, multilingual coverage affordable for both the biggest leagues and niche sports. In turn, they are able to better commercialize their broadcast coverage and build fanbases around the world.