How Sports Translate Live Games | Giovanni Galvez, VP of Sales at SyncWords

Global Sports Meets The Language Gap

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 0:45

The NFL is officially going global this season, featuring nine international games from Melbourne to Madrid. But considering that 80% of the world does not speak English, how many global sports fans are platforms and apps missing in the first few minutes of a stream? Hey everyone, welcome back to this day of streaming podcast. I'm your host Tim Rowe, and with football season kicking off and live sports dominating the global conversation, we pulled a special session from our recent live webinar with Giovanni Galvez from SyncWords. We talked about how platforms are using live localization to reach massive international audiences. And Gio even ran a live demo for us using Gemini to translate our stream, our live broadcast, into Spanish, French, and German in real time. The insights were just too good to leave as a video replay, so I cut out the housekeeping and pulled the best moments forward for you today. Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any of our sports season coverage. Now let's jump into the replay.

Why Localization Drives Engagement

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 2:01

So we've expanded our standard universe. Um, and I appreciate you making that possible. But we're just talking there in the lead up. What today's session will be all about is about language and about reaching audiences and ultimately driving engagement. We see the headlines, how much money is being spent on sports rights and the opportunity to distribute those things. So then, as apps and as platforms, how are we ultimately monetizing those things? And how are we finding the right audience? How are we engaging that audience on behalf of our advertisers? But we were just talking there in the lead up. Telemundo had to publish a correction to their first round viewership data. So we'll talk more obviously about language today. But Gio, welcome to State of Streaming.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 2:47

Thank you so much, Tim. It's exciting to be here and to talk about something that's that's I'm really passionate about, and that is like accessibility and localization. I would say that my entire life being someone from South America, you know, who who grew up in Washington, DC, I remember watching Knight Rider when I was like a kid, and you know, none of my family could understand what the heck was going on because it was all in English. I was trying to translate for him. Oh, this is what he said. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, so I've dealt with it my whole life, but now you know I'm I'm actually part of a great organization, SyncWords, that's doing something about it, especially when it comes to really special sporting events and and live news.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 3:32

I think especially sporting events, and it was fun. We connected a few weeks back in Denver at the Stream TV show. Ash, the founder, he he pulled uh Nicholas and myself aside, and we had a really interesting conversation. The technology, I think, definitely blew us both away, Nicholas and myself. And talking about accessibility, it's more than just native language. You're doing things in the accessibility for specifically other impairments and and other opportunities that you're bringing to the market. Can you tell us about that? How how does SyncWords solve accessibility? And then we can kind of dive into the problem that you ultimately

How SyncWords Approaches Accessibility

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 4:11

solve.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 4:12

I guess it started uh a long time ago. You know, SyncWords has been around for over 10 years. First, it started with just video clips. You know, there was this whole kind of thing where all of a sudden everyone was uploading video clips to to different depositories on on the cloud, and they wanted for those clips to be accessible. And it had to do more with like legislation, right? Like, especially here in the US and Canada. If you're like a government agency, you have to do it. If you're an education institute or organization or university college, is what I'm trying to say here. You have to caption your live events, your pre-recorded events. It started like that. And we still support till this day human captioners. So I want to make it clear that it's not AI versus humans here, it's about the delivery of it. You know, what's the most efficient way to deliver that to the viewers in a way that's meaningful? And that's what we've tried to do with accessibility, specifically closed captioning, and now with localized translation of that closed captioning, you know, both with uh subtitles and voice dubbing. And that also now includes even, you know, live sign language. But all of those things is a combination always of both humans and technology. And it's just about like what's the best viewer experience. That's really the the end solution that we we're trying to solve.

The Technical Gap From AI To Video

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 5:41

And primarily what we're talking about here today is about the ability to take a live streaming event and then turn it into multiple other derivative outputs where folks are able to consume it in their native language in real time. Can you take us through that? There's a lot technically that's happening behind the scenes. We're we're working really hard to unpack what streaming sports ultimately mean to advertisers. So maybe you could take us through how does a live stream turn into other languages that end up on my TV.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 6:17

Yeah, the the best way I think the to kind of describe it is is like to understand the gap involved because there's a lot going on, right? So the the first part of the gap is okay, when you said how do I translate, okay, well let's let's try to use let's say an LLM, right? Like Gemini, for example, or there's other engines out there, DeepL, Google, even. Okay, well, how do we get that into video? Right? That's the other aspect of it. Well, you can't like say, okay, here's Gemini output. Like video itself has certain standards for captioning, subtitling, and dubbing, you know, like there's certain codecs involved, there's certain protocols like 608, you know, the TV protocol, DVB for Europe, teletext, there's Web ETT, there's all kinds of things. What kind of video format are you gonna deliver? You know, is it gonna be like HLS, right? Or are you going to deliver it to like a YouTube, or is it gonna be custom? What about interactivity? You know, how many languages can I do? I can do Spanish, can I do French, Japanese, Korean, and then finally, and it does not limit it to all the things I'm talking about. How do I synchronize all of it? Right? Because the last thing you want is me saying something in English and then having the translation happening like 30 seconds or a minute later. The worst. Right? You want it to happen as I'm speaking as fast as possible in a way that's meaningful so that the viewer is engaged.

Live Dubbing Without Losing Emotion

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 7:56

One other thing that I didn't cover is what about adding dubbing, right? Translating the voice. What is dubbing? Yeah, so that's interesting. You know, most people think of dubbing. Well, you know, you go to a studio and then you have a voiceover guy, and you know, you have like all this nonlinear editing stuff going on. For live, it's more of an interpretation because you don't have time to, you know, to sit there and really fine-tune what you're gonna say. You have to kind of stay in sync, stay on top of it. And anyone that's ever heard like an interpretation when they're at a live event knows that you know there's someone out there like struggling, you know, trying to keep up. And they have to understand the the subject matter too. So for live streaming, let's say if you use like a synthetic voice for that and and some LLM, there has to be all these kind of guardrails so we can stay in sync, so we can stay on topic, so we can compress really long sentences. You know, you got three seconds to say that. So all of that is this part of this big gap that I was talking about, that we've used things on ingest to try to analyze the voice. You know, the voice can't be robotic, you know, they want a natural voice. If someone's like excited, that voice on the output side should be excited, it has to come through that way, right? Otherwise, you you're missing it out, you know. And one of our clients, for example, they're um a home shopping broadcaster. Is this Jewelry TV? Jewelry TV, that's right. And they have a 24-7 channel that is being translated with subtitles and voice dubbing into Spanish. You know, if anyone knows anything about sales, you can't sell unless you get emotional about it, right? If you have the voice, it's gotta make that that kind of emotion has to transfer that tonality.

Repurposing A 24/7 Channel Fast

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 9:52

I think we've got it up on screen here. They rebranded everything, they created a brand around the Spanish broadcast, but this is this is still the original broadcast. They've just created this whole additional layer on top of it. Is that a correct interpretation?

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 10:12

In this case, yes. I mean, they have other videos, of course, but that are you know specifically made for Latin American market for the live 24-7 feed is an English feed that's being repurposed with Spanish automatic translations for subtitles and voice.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 10:32

Reaching a new market without necessarily taking on a new operational lift.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 10:37

That's exactly right. If you wanted to enter a new market, you know, you you're you've got to think about ROI, right? We've seen that with sports broadcasters, like a good example of that is WWE Wrestling, for example. They have channels all over Europe and and so forth, Japan. And they they hire commentators, right, specifically for those countries. But if they have a 24-7 channel, you know, that's a huge investment just to get in the door into a new market. Whereas if you automate, right, and later on you could grow that that channel, right? But right away you're getting you're getting that in-the-door thing, something that's more viable to countries where they typically don't speak English, right? And but yet they want to see what you're sell or or what you're you know promoting or or events that you're broadcasting. And now you can see the metrics grow. As the metrics grow, you realize, okay, I can invest more money into that market. The real pain point there is like the uncertainty, right? Like you know you want to grow outside the US, but you don't want to have to, you know, like bet the farm on it, right?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 11:52

Right. Build a team, invest a ton of capex. This is a way that you can test a new market with an existing piece of content or existing output that you already have, and automating really a lot of that reach and extending the the impact of that content.

Drop-Off Data And Language Inclusion

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 12:06

I've got a couple of stats here. 80% of the world doesn't speak English. So when we're talking about reaching audiences, 80% of the world doesn't speak English, 76%. And not that this that surprised me, but it's just cool that there is a stat on it. 76% of people prefer to shop and spend in their native language. Gio, you can see too, you're able to see drop-off when viewers are actually dropping off from a stream. You're able to see how many hits across different languages, and these are likely metrics available to the broadcasters and the apps and the platforms themselves. But what are some of the interesting things that you're able to see when you peel back the onion and look at that?

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 12:51

You see that drop-off normally happens like within a few minutes of the start of the program or when people tune in. There's other reasons for drop-off, but generally as a whole, that's that's where we're seeing some drop-off rates for especially sporting events. If people tune in and you know they can't understand anything, or they feel like you know there's something not right with the audio or the video or or whatever the case may be, they're just like, okay, I'm I'm bailing, and I'm gonna try a different outlet to try to watch it if I'm really that interested. The story is language is a big factor in that drop-off rate. Because if I uh don't speak English, and let's say I speak, you know, speak French or or Spanish or Japanese or whatever, after a while, you know, you just you feel like, okay, I'm not included. This is just not for me, you know. And it's back to that whole thing. Like if you provide something that makes your viewers feel welcome and feel included, then they feel like we're doing something to want you to stay with us. I think you'll see a a less of a drop-off rate there, you know, if nothing else for curiosity. I could tell you just from experience, you know, any any Spanish speaker that they're watching like their favorite sporting myth for the first time in Spanish, golf or something. That's cool. They're like, you know, I want to see what this is about, you know. Like, what is this? You know, like how can how come I'm hearing it in Spanish for the first time?

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 14:23

It's an entirely new experience. I feel closer to it. It's now more relatable if we're right, we're after a finite number of people. There are only so many sets of eyeballs in the world. So, how do we capture them? How do we keep them engaged? Churn is such a huge problem for a lot of the streaming apps. Could language be one of those next levers? What are the trends? Who are the who are the interesting use cases?

Beyond Sports: Worship And Commencements

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 14:48

We talked about live sports, our creators. I know that tier one creator economy is really just starting to take shape. What are you seeing in terms of interesting use cases maybe beyond sport?

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 15:02

What we saw for the first time this year is household worship and high-profile events like commencements. We saw for the first time uh university in California add subtitling in Chinese, right? Which is a whole nother can of worms that that requires all this technical like like workflows to get past. And uh there's reasons for that. And it was a huge hit. You know, they saw like numbers and viewers, and they're like, we're gonna do this again, and we may expand to other languages as well. House of Worship. We we had last year the first ever live event, it was like this big conference, and they were doing like over 80 languages in a single stream, which has never been attempted before, right? So literally you're watching it, and then I want to see this in you know, Haitian Creole or you know, Malay or whatever, Korean, and it was there, the options were there, and that was a big hit. I think they're gonna do it again.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 16:05

That's pretty cool. We we covered this earlier in the year, and and this is the way that the chosen, uh very popular show has approached language translation is fascinating. They've built all of these communities around the world, built of scholars and local language experts to facilitate this. And essentially, what I heard you describe is this is available to anyone, like anyone can do this. So that's a pretty powerful story there

Live Demo: Switching Languages Instantly

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 16:35

that you shared. Gio, I think we're gonna do a live demo here. We're gonna we're gonna speak other languages. Is that right?

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 16:43

Since since you mentioned that, I want to mention that we've already been doing it since the beginning of this live stream. What do you mean? Earlier, I connected your live stream to our system for translation. Okay. And so as you went live, we're seeing it live in in other languages and streaming it on like an HLS player.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 17:07

Do you want to share your screen? Do you want to show us what it looks like? Give a little behind the scenes here.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 17:13

Yeah, so I'm sharing now my screen. Here I can change languages.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 17:18

I can see I can see that right now I am speaking German. I can see it in the subtitles. There's just at the bottom, bottom of the frame there. And if I select German, I can also, you know, you mein soeindruckt sein. So that's that's basically it. That's pretty incredible.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 17:44

That that recording will be available as soon as it's it's done. So I'll share it with you, and if you'd like to share it with your viewers, they can actually watch this again in in different languages.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 17:56

I think that'll be a fun way to chop up the the final episode.

New Subtitle Standards And What’s Next

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 18:00

And gee, I'm really interested to see where this goes. We're we're halfway through 2026. What are you most excited about? What's on the horizon for the rest of this year, maybe looking forward into 2027?

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 18:13

What we're seeing in preparation for the big video conference in Amsterdam, which is in September called IBC. There is now vendors streaming encoders that are supporting the new modern standard of subtitling. Which is not like it used to be, right? All these broadcast standards like teletext and the American 608 standard, there were so many limitations, right? You couldn't do Korean, you can do Japanese. If I wanted to, I could tell Gemini to put emojis every time I say the word like sunny, right? Like a little smiley faced sun, and it will do it. So it unlocks the potential of doing live subtitling for anyone in the world, right? You're in Mongolia, you're in Thailand, you just hit go. But some major, major players in streaming are gonna just tell people, you know, if you want live translations and dubbing in any language, just hit these buttons when you stream. That's fine. And you know, it might even be related to this platform we're using right now. Who knows?

Where To Find SyncWords

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 19:37

But wait, there's more kids. I think it's the first rule of show business. Keep them coming back for more. Gio, you've done that. Thank you. If folks want to learn more about syncwords, if they want to connect with you, where are you most active on social? What's the dot com? Give them the give them the lat long.

Giovanni Galvez, SyncWords 19:53

Sure, you can find us at syncwords.com. We're also on LinkedIn. You can look me up. Giovanni Galva is on LinkedIn as well. Feel free to follow me or add me. And if you want to try this out for yourself, of course. I'll be happy to like do a technical test with you. That's that's always the most most fun thing. It's awesome.

Tim Rowe, State of Streaming 20:15

Gio, thanks so much for sharing not only the technology with us and with the audience today, but sharing your deep insight behind the scenes, taking us uh inside the product live demo that's bold. But obviously, that's the the pressure test that you live under every single day. So thank you for being here. Thank you, Tim. If you found this to be helpful, we're gonna re-share this. So you're you're gonna hear this as a podcast. So definitely go back, watch the live stream, get everything out of it. Make sure to subscribe to State of Streaming, wherever you're watching, wherever you're following along, because this will be coming out as a podcast, lots of derivative content. So you can learn more about sync words and what they can solve for you. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.