When milliseconds matter: Real-time multilingual subtitling at global sports broadcast scale
How Timbra and Norsk brought broadcast-grade, low-latency multilingual subtitles to one of the world’s most-watched live sport properties.
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About the client
The broadcaster is one of the world’s leading sports media companies, producing and distributing live coverage of a premium international sport property to audiences across multiple markets. With tens of millions of viewers tuning in across broadcast and streaming platforms, accurate, synchronised subtitles are both a regulatory requirement and a viewer experience imperative.
When milliseconds matter in live sport
Live sport at this scale is one of the most technically demanding broadcast environments in the world. Commentary moves fast, terminology is highly specialised, and multiple feeds, platforms and regulatory requirements have to be managed simultaneously.
The broadcaster needed to deliver accurate multilingual subtitles across concurrent streams while reducing latency — without rebuilding its existing playout infrastructure or adding editorial headcount. Generic AI captioning tools had already been ruled out because they couldn't deliver the required accuracy for specialist terminology, driver names and team names.
Head of Digital Technology, leading sports broadcaster“Live sport doesn't wait. We needed subtitles that could keep pace with commentary in the most technically complex broadcast environment we run—reliably, every event, across every market.”
Built for broadcast, tuned for sport
CaptionHub deployed Timbra in partnership with Norsk, integrating directly into the broadcaster's existing live workflow without requiring infrastructure changes. Norsk handles SRT ingest and timing, passing the feed into Timbra for real-time transcription and translation before WebVTT subtitles are returned to the broadcaster's existing CDN.
Timbra's ASR was tuned for sports commentary, with custom terminology covering event-specific vocabulary. Four language outputs are delivered automatically, while the CaptionHub API allows the broadcaster's own systems to start and stop captioning and control the workflow without manual intervention.
Sr Solutions Architect, leading sports broadcaster“The reliability was what stood out. In live sport there's no such thing as a test run—every event is the real thing. Timbra gave us confidence that the subtitles would be there, in each language, every time.”