Eurovision Sport deploys AI to scale Eight-language athletics streaming commentary
Eurovision Sport has partnered with CAMB.AI to implement AI-generated multilingual commentary for the European Athletics U18 Championships. The project utilizes a French-language audio source to produce localized commentary in eight different languages for the EBU’s digital streaming platform.
Key Takeaways
- AI-translated commentary will support Dutch, German, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish language feeds.
- Project utilizes French-language remote audio as the primary source for CAMB.AI translation and synthesis.
- Italian commentary is excluded from the AI pilot to protect domestic coverage by EBU Member and host broadcaster RAI.
- European Athletics plans to expand the implementation to selected field event finals at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham this August.
Why It Matters
This initiative represents a significant step in using generative audio to solve the technical and financial hurdles of hyper-localizing live sports for fragmented global audiences. By bypassing the cost of multi-language broadcast booths, the EBU is testing a scalable model for niche and youth sports that historically lack localization budgets. For the broader ecosystem, this validates AI's role in live production stacks, shifting the focus from experimental 'voice cloning' to industrialized, real-time distribution. Watch for accuracy and latency metrics during the U18 Championships in Rieti (July 16-19) as a signal for broader adoption at major 2026 events.
Additional Context
The collaboration between Eurovision Sport and CAMB.AI is part of a multi-year technical roadmap initiated in 2024 to modernize the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) digital output. Per CAMB.AI (March 2026), the partnership recently focused on the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games, where the companies deployed real-time, contextual speech-to-text transcription to provide live subtitling across all six Paralympic sports. This follows earlier collaborative milestones, such as AI-powered audio versions for live blogs and localized editorial content designed to enhance the EBU’s free-to-watch streaming model.
Broadcasters worldwide are increasingly integrating similar speech-to-speech technologies to penetrate diverse markets. In September 2025, FanCode became the first sports OTT in India to offer real-time AI commentary in regional languages for Caribbean Premier League cricket, also utilizing CAMB.AI’s infrastructure to preserve crowd noise and prosody (per Sportcal, September 2025). Furthermore, the YES Network in New York announced a strategic collaboration with CAMB.AI in November 2025 to explore personalized multilingual experiences for Yankees and Nets fans, marking a shift toward AI localization in U.S. regional sports networks.
Market data underscores this technical pivot. According to Precedence Research (June 2026), the global AI in sports market is valued at approximately $13.1 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $70.16 billion by 2035. While performance analysis remains a primary use case, natural language processing (NLP) for fan engagement—including automated commentary and localized narratives—is identified as a critical growth segment. The European Athletics Championships in Birmingham (August 10-16, 2026) will serve as the next major proving ground for these generative content engines at scale (per European Athletics, July 2026).
Read full article at advanced-television.com
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