CaptionHub – Sports and Content Rights Holders: Your Biggest Audience Isn’t a New Market, It’s a Language Gap

Kirsty McGowan, Director of Marketing, CaptionHub

When organizations think about audience growth, the conversation usually centers on new markets, new rights, or expanded distribution. The assumption is simple: growth comes from reaching somewhere new.

In reality, growth is just as often unlocked by deepening engagement in existing markets – increasing fan connection, retention, and ultimately revenue. The question is: how much of your existing audience is meaningfully engaging with your content?

In the US alone, there are over 42 million Spanish speakers. Globally, Spanish reaches more than 636 million people. Add Mandarin and Portuguese, and you’re looking at an addressable audience of over 2 billion people. That’s not a marginal opportunity. It’s a quarter of the world.

These audiences are not out of reach. In many cases, they’re already watching. Yet much of today’s video content is still produced as if English is enough.

Audience Growth Starts With Language, Not Geography

Sport is one of the clearest examples of this disconnect. Organizations invest heavily in international growth strategies, expanding into new regions, securing global rights deals, and building fanbases market by market. But the content itself often doesn’t follow.

A viewer in São Paulo, Shanghai, or Los Angeles may have access to the same live stream, highlights, and social clips – but not in a language that allows them to fully engage with it.

Engagement goes beyond comprehension. It’s about retention and emotional connection. Research published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science shows that captioning video content improves brand recall, verbal memory, and behavioral intent. In practice, that means language directly influences whether content resonates and drives value.

Audiences today are global by default. They discover content socially and consume it across platforms, expecting it to meet them where they are. If it doesn’t, they move on. Language is no longer a layer added after production, it is part of the experience itself.

Engagement Doesn’t Happen in Translation

The global sports events market is projected to grow by 52% by 2030. But consumption alone doesn’t equal connection.

Only around 19% of the global population speaks English as a first or second language. That means many viewers are consuming content in a language that isn’t their own — they can follow it, but they’re not experiencing it in the same way. That distinction matters.

A 2025 study in Sport Marketing Quarterly found that presenting sports content in a viewer’s native language significantly increases attention, recall, and overall engagement — including how sponsor messaging is perceived and remembered. Two viewers can watch the same match, at the same time, on the same platform, and walk away with very different levels of understanding, emotional connection, and brand recall.

Language doesn’t determine whether content is accessible. It determines how deeply it resonates.

When Global Reach Isn’t the Same as Global Understanding

This becomes particularly visible at the highest level of live sport.

We recently worked with a global sports brand whose content already reaches audiences in almost every market. From a distribution perspective, they have had global scale for decades. Their events are watched worldwide across broadcast and digital platforms, and like many rights owners, they have increasingly taken ownership of distribution.

But internally, there was a growing recognition that reach wasn’t the same as engagement. The live feed was global. The experience wasn’t.

Commentary, graphics, and context were still largely delivered in a single language. Fans everywhere could access the same moments, but not all of them were engaging with it at the same depth. The nuance and narrative that turn viewers into long-term fans were often diluted.

The shift they made wasn’t about expanding into new territories. It was about deepening engagement in the audiences they already had.

Using Timbra, CaptionHub’s real-time localization suite, they introduced multilingual captioning directly into their live workflows, starting with six languages and expanding over time. Crucially, this wasn’t treated as a separate production. It was layered directly into the existing experience.

The impact was immediate. Viewers became more engaged. Content performed better across digital channels. Internal conversations shifted from “where do we grow next?” to “how do we better serve the audience we’ve already built?”

It is a subtle shift, but an important one. It reframes language from a localization exercise into a growth lever.

Why This Hasn’t Been Solved Already

Translation at scale has always been difficult to get right.

Live content creates volume and urgency. There is no margin for delay. Workflows need to keep up without introducing friction or failure points.

Accuracy is another challenge. Generic translation struggles with the nuance of sport: player names, team terminology, cultural references, and the pace of commentary. Errors don’t just reduce quality, they undermine credibility.

Then there’s cost. Traditional approaches rely heavily on manual processes, making it difficult to scale across multiple languages.

For a long time, the trade-off was clear: high quality at high cost, or broader reach with inconsistent results.

From Translation as a Cost to Translation as Infrastructure

That trade-off is now breaking down. The shift mirrors what we’ve already seen across the broadcast stack. Capabilities that were once treated as specialist add-ons are becoming part of core infrastructure, expected to scale and integrate reliably. Translation is moving in the same direction.

Advances in AI have improved baseline quality, but the bigger change is architectural. Translation no longer needs to sit outside the workflow. It can operate within live production and distribution environments.

Adding a new language no longer requires building a parallel production. It becomes a configurable output. This fundamentally changes the economics. The marginal cost of reaching an additional audience drops, while the upside in reach, engagement, and monetization remains high.

What Broadcasters Should Be Asking Now

The industry has already accepted that distribution needs to be global. The question now is whether communication is keeping up. If a significant proportion of your audience isn’t engaging with your content at the same depth, growth isn’t being constrained by rights or reach. It’s being constrained by language.

That is a different problem — and a solvable one. The organizations that move first will treat this as an audience strategy. Because your biggest untapped audience isn’t somewhere new, it is already watching.