M+E Europe

The Meta Localisation Platform can significantly help media and entertainment organisations streamline their supply chains, Rob Tucker, CEO and founder of Meta, said Feb. 25, during the Language & Metadata breakout session “Introduction to the META Localisation Platform” at the Content Workflow Management Forum, “M&E’s Premiere Localisation Event.”

The platform, developed in collaboration with WarnerMedia, centralises subtitling, dubbing, translation, graphics and artwork localisation requirements for WarnerMedia’s catalogue of more than 250,000 titles.

It also plays a key part in the technical and editorial compliance processes and enables a clear audit trail of communication between internal teams and external partners, while eliminating the possibility of task duplication and keeping a centralised record of all global assets.

During his presentation, Tucker first explained just how complicated the entire M&E ecosystem has become.

“Within media and entertainment organisations, you have these supply chains of which localisation management is kind of firmly in the middle,” Tucker pointed out.

“Now, outside of that supply chain, you’ve got lots of external parties that you need to interact with to pass data to and bring it back from,” he explained. They include localisation studios and there may be many of them “that you need to engage with,” he said.

“You may also be bringing data into your supply chain from third-party enrichment sources feeding into that process upstream of localisation management,” he pointed out.

“Then, right at the other end, you’ve got delivery” partners using many different platforms, followed by ratings bodies and analytics, he noted, adding: “Then the whole thing is supported at all the different stages by lots of teams of people – and it could be hundreds of partners, dozens of systems and lots and lots of people. And so this is a very  complex architecture.”

Add to that different formats, “inconsistent data structures,” applications that “aren’t driven by APIs, emails and spreadsheets flying all over the place and this can invariably lead to a number of problems,” he told viewers.

He pointed to several common localisation “pain points”: Decentralised management, multiple sources, data in spreadsheets, missed deliveries, manual processes, and reporting challenges.

Tucker then provided a demonstration of how Meta solves the challenges, providing: Title catalogue management, metadata enrichment, a supply chain dashboard, process automation, comprehensive reporting, and localisation management.

“You can build reports along the lines of: Show me every single title that we’ve got in the catalogue that is going to this platform in this territory in this month that doesn’t yet have a Swedish sub or a dub, or something like that,” he explained.

“You can then build these localisation prioritisation lists from your… source title catalogue,” he noted.

Click here to access video of the presentation. Click here to download the presentation slide deck.

The Content Workflow Management Forum was produced by MESA, the Audio Business Continuity Alliance, Content Localisation Council, Smart Content Council, and the Hollywood IT Society, with sponsorship by Iyuno Media Group, Richey May Technology Solutions, Whip Media Group, Deluxe, Digital Nirvana, Meta, Vubiquity, EIDR, Keywords Studios, Los Angeles Duplication & Broadcasting, Nexus TV, OOONA, Signiant and Titles-On.