NEWSROOM
Spalk’s Olympian effort to make sports commentary accessible
20 February 2024
From student idea to multi-national company, Spalk has been used to translate sports commentary into dozens of languages for sports events such as the Super Bowl.
The kick of closing one sale was all it took to set a school-age Ben Reynolds on the path to an entrepreneurial career. The co-founder of Spalk – a software service which localises sports content by providing alternative commentaries for sports streaming providers, teams and brands – was still a student at Westlake Boys High School when he took part in the Young Enterprise Scheme. “My team made a package of ringtones with common phrases in foreign languages – this was before iPhone and Google Translate made this simple – to help travellers. We went from an idea to turning over several thousand dollars and partnering with several local travel agencies,” he remembers. “There’s nothing quite like the excitement of your first sale – and from then I was hooked.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Ben chose to nurture his nascent business skills by embarking on a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, majoring in Economics and Entrepreneurship. Over the course of his studies, an idea for combining his passion for sports with his growing business knowledge and academic achievements (he won the Business Student of the Year Award in 2014) began to crystallise. In 2015 he and Spalk co-founder Michael Prendergast – a fellow University of Auckland graduate, in Engineering Science – took part in Velocity, a programme delivered by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). Ben describes their entry to the Velocity $100k Challenge as “the precursor” to Spalk.
Unfortunately, it was time for a reality check. The Velocity experience offered an important early entrepreneurial lesson: success is never a given. Their proposal was “summarily declined”, he laughs. “However, entrepreneurship is all about rolling with the punches, and we did not let that setback dishearten us!”
Instead, they set to work refining their concept, and in November that year they launched Spalk. Born of their belief that sport is both a universal language and a universal passion, the vision behind Spalk was simply to offer more options around sharing the world’s diverse sporting stories. The software Ben and Michael subsequently developed enables multiple sports commentaries on a single stream of video, giving sports fans the opportunity to view video with their own choice of audio. From a business perspective, the service significantly boosts viewership, accessibility and engagement; for sports fanatics all over the world, the service significantly enhances that unique game day experience.
Eight years on, the company powers commentary and international rights distribution for the world’s leading sports teams, broadcasters and content owners. “What started as a way to have fun with friends on the weekend around our passion for sports has morphed into an organisation turning over NZ$5m annually, employing more than 20 people around the globe and powering live broadcasts for tens of thousands of sports matches every single year,” explains Ben. 2023 alone was an “incredible” year for Spalk, he says, noting that the company produced commentary for more than 30,000 live events and offered more than 35 languages of coverage, including new expansion languages of Icelandic, Korean, Danish, Greek and even Wolof (spoken by the Wolof people, a West African ethnic group). “Spalk was used at the pinnacle of global sport,” enthuses Ben. “We had coverage across 19 World Championships, our third Super Bowl and our first MLB World Series.”
A number of pivotal relationships have been crucial to the company’s success, he notes. “There have been so many people who have helped me over the course of starting and growing Spalk.” He cites media consultant Mike Rehu as one of these: as the Head of Content at Whakaata Māori at the time, Mike became Spalk’s first customer when the company forged their first ever commercial partnership with the television company. After Mike moved on from Whakaata Māori, Ben and Michael asked him to join Spalk’s board of directors. “He said yes, and has been an instrumental mentor and friend throughout the journey,” says Ben.
Ultimately, of course, it is Ben’s relationship with his equally sports-mad business partner, Michael, that has provided the unshakeable foundation for Spalk’s continued growth. “Michael has been a rock throughout the past eight years,” observes Ben. “It has been pivotal to our success to have a hard-working, pragmatic and ambitious founding team.” The importance of these career-enhancing relationships marks another valuable lesson he’s learned on his entrepreneurial journey: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
But Ben’s key takeaway to date? “You have to default to action,” he states. “The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter. So figuring out that there is a critical path to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.” Talking to customers is also essential, he adds. “That is the only way you can learn what their problems are and build something that they value.”
So what’s next for Spalk? The Olympics, no less. “2024 is, of course, an Olympic year, so I am personally excited that Spalk will play a small part in producing multilingual commentary coverage for so many of the athletes as they finalise their preparations and qualifications for the Olympics,” says Ben. The fact that Spalk is playing a part in increasing accessibility to one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events is the latest highlight in a lengthy and still evolving list of the company’s achievements. “We have graduated out of ‘start-up’ mode and are a fully-fledged high-growth technology company now,” observes Ben. Fittingly for someone in the business of bringing stories to a wider audience, he summarises the “twists and turns” of his entrepreneurial journey with a quote by Bilbo Baggins from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring: “‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”
Still, it seems that Spalk is on pretty solid ground.
20 February 2024
From student idea to multi-national company, Spalk has been used to translate sports commentary into dozens of languages for sports events such as the Super Bowl.
The kick of closing one sale was all it took to set a school-age Ben Reynolds on the path to an entrepreneurial career. The co-founder of Spalk – a software service which localises sports content by providing alternative commentaries for sports streaming providers, teams and brands – was still a student at Westlake Boys High School when he took part in the Young Enterprise Scheme. “My team made a package of ringtones with common phrases in foreign languages – this was before iPhone and Google Translate made this simple – to help travellers. We went from an idea to turning over several thousand dollars and partnering with several local travel agencies,” he remembers. “There’s nothing quite like the excitement of your first sale – and from then I was hooked.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Ben chose to nurture his nascent business skills by embarking on a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, majoring in Economics and Entrepreneurship. Over the course of his studies, an idea for combining his passion for sports with his growing business knowledge and academic achievements (he won the Business Student of the Year Award in 2014) began to crystallise. In 2015 he and Spalk co-founder Michael Prendergast – a fellow University of Auckland graduate, in Engineering Science – took part in Velocity, a programme delivered by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). Ben describes their entry to the Velocity $100k Challenge as “the precursor” to Spalk.
Unfortunately, it was time for a reality check. The Velocity experience offered an important early entrepreneurial lesson: success is never a given. Their proposal was “summarily declined”, he laughs. “However, entrepreneurship is all about rolling with the punches, and we did not let that setback dishearten us!”
Instead, they set to work refining their concept, and in November that year they launched Spalk. Born of their belief that sport is both a universal language and a universal passion, the vision behind Spalk was simply to offer more options around sharing the world’s diverse sporting stories. The software Ben and Michael subsequently developed enables multiple sports commentaries on a single stream of video, giving sports fans the opportunity to view video with their own choice of audio. From a business perspective, the service significantly boosts viewership, accessibility and engagement; for sports fanatics all over the world, the service significantly enhances that unique game day experience.
Eight years on, the company powers commentary and international rights distribution for the world’s leading sports teams, broadcasters and content owners. “What started as a way to have fun with friends on the weekend around our passion for sports has morphed into an organisation turning over NZ$5m annually, employing more than 20 people around the globe and powering live broadcasts for tens of thousands of sports matches every single year,” explains Ben. 2023 alone was an “incredible” year for Spalk, he says, noting that the company produced commentary for more than 30,000 live events and offered more than 35 languages of coverage, including new expansion languages of Icelandic, Korean, Danish, Greek and even Wolof (spoken by the Wolof people, a West African ethnic group). “Spalk was used at the pinnacle of global sport,” enthuses Ben. “We had coverage across 19 World Championships, our third Super Bowl and our first MLB World Series.”
A number of pivotal relationships have been crucial to the company’s success, he notes. “There have been so many people who have helped me over the course of starting and growing Spalk.” He cites media consultant Mike Rehu as one of these: as the Head of Content at Whakaata Māori at the time, Mike became Spalk’s first customer when the company forged their first ever commercial partnership with the television company. After Mike moved on from Whakaata Māori, Ben and Michael asked him to join Spalk’s board of directors. “He said yes, and has been an instrumental mentor and friend throughout the journey,” says Ben.
Ultimately, of course, it is Ben’s relationship with his equally sports-mad business partner, Michael, that has provided the unshakeable foundation for Spalk’s continued growth. “Michael has been a rock throughout the past eight years,” observes Ben. “It has been pivotal to our success to have a hard-working, pragmatic and ambitious founding team.” The importance of these career-enhancing relationships marks another valuable lesson he’s learned on his entrepreneurial journey: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
But Ben’s key takeaway to date? “You have to default to action,” he states. “The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter. So figuring out that there is a critical path to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.” Talking to customers is also essential, he adds. “That is the only way you can learn what their problems are and build something that they value.”
So what’s next for Spalk? The Olympics, no less. “2024 is, of course, an Olympic year, so I am personally excited that Spalk will play a small part in producing multilingual commentary coverage for so many of the athletes as they finalise their preparations and qualifications for the Olympics,” says Ben. The fact that Spalk is playing a part in increasing accessibility to one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events is the latest highlight in a lengthy and still evolving list of the company’s achievements. “We have graduated out of ‘start-up’ mode and are a fully-fledged high-growth technology company now,” observes Ben. Fittingly for someone in the business of bringing stories to a wider audience, he summarises the “twists and turns” of his entrepreneurial journey with a quote by Bilbo Baggins from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring: “‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”
Still, it seems that Spalk is on pretty solid ground.
EMAIL
CIE@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ
POSTAL ADDRESS
THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND BUSINESS SCHOOL
PRIVATE BAG 92019, AUCKLAND
