How MLS Brought An International Audience By Live-Translating Its Live Broadcast With AI

Problem

MLS NEXT Pro was preparing for the 2024 Generation Adidas Cup at full speed.

However, the league faced two major challenges:

• Lack of global accessibility and international fan engagement: Soccer is inherently international, yet MLS NEXT Pro’s broadcasts were traditionally limited to English commentary.

This meant non-English-speaking fans couldn’t fully experience live matches in their native languages.

• It's hard to test new AI technology in a live setting: Through its newly launched MLS Innovation Lab, MLS wanted to experiment with next-generation sports tech.

The problem was that finding a real-time use case to validate AI translation, player-tracking, and automated production systems under the pressures of a live match environment was difficult.

MLS needed a tangible “proof of concept” to justify broader, league-wide deployment of these innovations.

Solution

To tackle both issues, MLS NEXT Pro partnered with Camb AI (that's us) to conduct a live, AI-powered, multi-language broadcast of the Orlando City B vs. Inter Miami II match.

Camb AI's dubbing solution, DubStudio, ingested English play-by-play audio and produced translated text tokens in four languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French) while preserving the original commentator’s cadence and tone.

But that's not where it ends.

Our tool's speech emulation capabilities under our AI model, Mars, recreated speech in each target language using the live audio’s acoustic signature to make sure that ambient crowd noise, background music, and tonal inflexions were retained.

And the best part about all of this? Camb AI was able to handle all four languages at the same time, with under 30 seconds of latency.

MLS NEXT Pro experimented with the AI technology by streaming the match live and for free. Viewers were able to toggle between English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French commentary options in real-time.

Results

MLS NEXT Pro's collaboration with Camb AI turned out to be the first live AI-powered, multi-language broadcast in U.S. soccer.

Fans were tuning in from Canada, Brazil, Portugal, France, or other soccer markets were able to follow the game without delay or human-translation errors.

We've also got some numbers to show:

• MLS NEXT Pro’s website traffic spiked by 35% after 48 hours following the match
• The share of live viewers streaming from non-English-speaking countries was 22%.
• Social metrics showed a 40% increase in share and engagement from Spanish- and Portuguese-language fan accounts compared to previous broadcasts.

Our collaboration demonstrated the proof of concept of AI technology that MLS wanted to see, with a sub-30-second latency in four languages simultaneously, with over 95% transcription accuracy on noisy stadium audio.

Moving forward, our team will use the insights from the Orlando City B vs. Inter Miami II broadcast to refine Camb AI’s models (e.g., adding more dialect variants, reducing latency).