M+E Daily

On Feb. 29, during the ITS Localisation event in London, localization vendors and technology service providers explored what they saw as the key opportunities and potential pitfalls for the industry over the next 2-3 years.

During the session “The Future as Seen by the Localization Vendors and Technology Service Providers,” panelists pointed to “complex issues” including actor and writer strikes, continued pressures on cost of living, generative AI, cloud-based workflows and competition for viewers as key challenges. And those are in addition to legislative changes and ethical concerns regarding some of the new technologies.

The panel was made up of Belén Agulló Garcia, director, operations program management, at Deluxe; Bobby Johar, global managing director of Blu Digital Group; and Nav Khangura, VP of business development at Prime Focus Technologies.

Yota Georgakopoulou, consultant with Athena Consultancy, served as the moderator. She opened the session by pointing to the “pretty gloomy” news of the past year and asked where the panellists think we are now, almost a year after the entertainment industry strikes. “Is the industry on the road to recovery now?”

Responding, Johar said: “From today’s discussions and the presentations we’ve had, I think it’s apparent that the industry as a whole is facing significant challenges in globalization post- pandemic. In retrospect, if you think about it, the volume we experienced during the pandemic was also artificially high. And so I think we need to bear that in mind.”

Meanwhile, the major platforms were “massively successful in driving content growth and globalization and exploiting in a positive way for all of us the growing home audiences,” he said.

“Now, fast forwarding to 2024, we are experiencing constant saturation,” he noted. “That’s what we’ve heard today” at the IST event.

“We have also experienced global and record high inflation,” he pointed out, adding: “Those factors combined [have] forced the industry leaders to reassess their strategy, quite simply. And so that means scaling down on content, taking a pause, figuring out what to produce, but also how to produce it. And I think when we talk about globalisation – that’s what we’re doing today – how is becoming the x factor.”

He predicted we will still see volume increasing but the way it’s going to be packaged, is going to be “very different,” he said. “For the ones who are positioning themselves into one area only, they will experience serious disruption,” he predicted.

Prime Focus, meanwhile, “certainly saw what everyone has spoken about today…. [That being] a shift [in] the amount of new content that’s coming through from the Western world…. Certainly, you’ve seen the shift there. I think where we’re a little bit different [is] “we predominantly work within the APAC market.”

But he added: “We’re obviously increasing our presence here in the Western world. So dubbing-wise and subtitling wise, predominantly on the dubbing side, we’ve not seen a huge shift in our primary market.”

He added: “In terms of kind of the subtitling side, we’ve certainly seen changes there. But we have also seen a lot of new entrants in the content community. Um, where you see, um, repurposing the content and things like that…. So where one side has certainly come down in terms of new Western content, we’ve seen actually growth in other parts…. What we’re trying to do is work with clients to see if there’s ways that we can help them re-purpose their content.”

Deluxe, meanwhile, likes to “look at the bright side of things as well a little bit,” according to Garcia. “Even if last year was a little bit lower on the English originals, we are seeing steady growth” elsewhere, she said.

IT Localisation was presented by MESA in association with the Content Localisation Council and Smart Content Council, and sponsored by Dubformer, Iyuno, AppTek, EIDR, Blu Digital Group, OOONA, Papercup, and Deluxe.