How Localization is changing in the new VOD world of Media consumption

1. ‘MR WIAP is your Friend’
Author: Mazin Al-Jumaili – Director of Business Development, Europe.
I was recently asked by an Executive at a major media content holder whether the company
I worked for had a number of structural attributes they considered ‘must haves’. How many
staff do you have? How many offices do you have? What is your global footprint? My
answer back was a single word ‘irrelevant’.
Needless to say this was taken as a somewhat arrogant response. We didn’t move forward
with our engagement. Their safety net caught us, removed us, put us in a pile marked ‘let
someone else talk to them next year’.
So what’s so important about those attributes? No one likes to take a risk especially when
they are responsible for making a decision that would put their own role in jeopardy. Go
with what you know. Do not visit MR WIAP (I will explain later!)
The filmand TV post world stuck with this safety net for a good many years. To begin with it
was purely down to fundamental limitations in the supply chain. We all worked in a physical
world. We had to ship film, tape and hard drives to each other. In the subtitling world, titles
were replicated on VHS and biked to people’s homes. This meant that you had to have a
local office in territory with a nearby workforce. Most of whom travelled into work to sit
among banks of translator workstations to access their media.
The first revolution
Then came the first revolution. Our developed subtitling tools migrated to desktop but ‘in
the home’ no less. Our valued remote workforce was suddenly relieved of the burden of
waiting for a courier, or even having to spend money to travel to that recently established
local office to sit is their call centre environment.
Our formats changed also. VHS turned to DVD then to Blu-ray. More content, more
languages, more offices, more territories. Heck, lets open a US office!
‘Localization’ or ‘Localisation’? It was no longer a dirty word for content holders trying to
control production budgets. Subtitling ?! Why does it cost so much? Do we really need it?
Can you do it for nothing? Real questions I’ve had over the years…. It became and HAS
become the principal theme in the media supply chain. Recognition at last!
But that’s also when the problems started. Demand started to exceed supply. Bigger agents
controlled market share with their multi-territory expansion. Competition became very
aggressive. The differentiator between these companies was thin. Our customers smelled
blood and played us off against each other. We cut our own throats. Prices were dumped.
There was no meeting of minds gathering in a secretive, off-the-record location to thrash

2. out a combined strategy. No agreement to keep the value of what we did at a certain level,
so that no one dropped their pants to make a quick win! It didn’t happen that way. We all
undid our belts quicker than you could say “Expelliarmus!” And the rest is history. Or so we
thought until MR WIAP appeared – I will explain soon, I promise!
We became bloated and top heavy as organisations, controlling vast swathes of translators
and shiny offices with expanding rents in thriving city centres. Our deliverables became
more complex so we had to develop and adapt our QC tools to accommodate multiple
additions to multiple portals and local broadcasters. This comes at a price of course.
Businesses needed to invest. Subtitling tools – especially the desktop versions - lumbered
along in their development. Reliant on legacy. They will still tell you …. “But this one goes up
to eleven!”
Prices to customers were decreasing rapidly due to our pants-dropping greed based on
volume deals. We assured our valued clients that the more they gave us the bigger rebates
they would receive. How clever of us. Really thinking ahead….
We cut our own throats.
Blu-ray turned to VOD. Overnight the world we enjoyed and thought we had control of
became ‘Disrupted’. Physical offices, physical tapes, hard drives, workstations associated
with nailed down office terminals. They all disappeared – or are in their last throes.
How could we now offer attractive working conditions to those who have spent years
pursuing their academic love and are in higher demand than ever? With this model, we
couldn’t.
And so came the second revolution. ….’Cloud Solutions’.
‘Cloud’
Did you glance upwards?! Ethereal description and quite inaccurate. In every sense.
‘Cloud’ as a noun: used to refer to a state or cause of gloom, suspicion, trouble, or worry.
Synonyms: threat, menace, shadow, spectre, blight.
There is something menacing and foreboding about the unknown and terming something as
being ‘in the Cloud’ really doesn’t explain that there is no storm blocking the sun and forcing
us to cower in ignorance until it passes.
Cloud as a verb: make or become less clear or transparent. Synonyms: make cloudy, make
murky, dirty, darken, blacken.
There is just no escaping it. Cloud as a term is just not giving me that warm trusting feeling. I
want to run away from it. I am also too afraid to ask in public for fear of looking the idiot.
What…. Is…. It….??

3. Why don’t we call it ‘Magical RealmWhere It’s All Possible’ or MR WIAP. There. That
sounds lovely and not so threatening.
So working in our ‘Magical RealmWhere It’s All Possible’ means a whole lot of the mundane
tasks around media production are ‘simplified’. Let me list a few:
 Creating secure video media and giving access to hundreds of users in a matter of
minutes.
 Enabling those users to manage their precious time actually working on ‘content
creation’ without worrying about setup, downloading media, local service storage
usage on their own desktop or fighting with conflicting translation tools.
 Are you a Translator? Why not try translating for a living rather than become a
media management expert? Let MR WIAP do that bit.
 Tracking growing orders of multiple languages which in turn are generated by
multiple seasons of multiple original language content being translated into every
conceivable language and delivered in multiple formats to multiple densely created
specifications…. Come on MR WAIP surely you can help? Yup just plug me in, that bit
is just maths.
Basically we are now tenants and MR WIAP is our helpful landlord. He has to follow and
adhere to strict SLA’s created to protect us. If you bought a house and your boiler broke you
have to spend money you haven’t budgeted for on a new heating system. But if you rented
that house MR WIAP as your contracted landlord has to replace it with as little disruption to
your life as possible. Infact before you moved in he already installed a top fo the range
boiler and given you an app to control your heating options while you sit on the train.
A special shiny kind of round
The blessing of an exploding SVOD market means that these entities have consciously and
without fear ‘disrupted’ and reinvented rules. Reinvented our wheel, that was already
round, to make it a special shiny kind of round. Refined our translation rules and updated
them to be relevant to the 21st century, post-Millennial viewer.
The legacy of the pants-droppers can be air brushed over. Our saviour? The resurrection of
QUALITY. If content holders want to make sure their valued product makes international
money, it has to travel well. To travel well it needs to be translated with care. Which needs
more attention. Our price structures should reflect this. You want quality. You pay for it.
We are all now ‘ultra-measured’. As the new world order - which doesn’t slow down but
speeds up in volume expectation – shifts up a gear. MR WIAP is going to need an upgrade
soon. An overnight process. Seamless. The next 5 years will see a doubling in output of
content to support mature and local start up SVOD services. The impatient and confused
public want something special to make that leap into the regular subscription world rather

4. than standard broadcaster packages. By definition they need all of it, translated into
multiples of languages… you get the picture. So we need MR WIAP.
Managing quality. Pointing out areas of improvement. Developers engaging with translation
experts. Even better translation experts hiring developers who understand their medium.
That’s a shift. A meeting of minds. Who would have thought a few years ago that we would
cross-pollinate superheroes in the same movie? It’s happened. The same is happening with
technology and translation. Not with replacement but with tools designed to help the
creative process. One complimenting the other and coming up with…. Creative Innovation.
MR WIAP, if used correctly, without the insidious cloudy threat of translation replacement,
will be your toolset. You won’t be the toolset of it.
MR WIAP is your friend
We have successfully developed less costly, more considerate work environments. Your own
home. We are able to drop and pick up kids on school runs, balance personal appointments,
deal with sickness and live our lives. No more stigma or jealous glances across the office as
you leave early. No need to be at your desk in your centrally located, not very well air
conditioned office… MR WAIP is helping you achieve living your life in a 21st century way.
So let us review. We don’t need 30 offices. We don’t need to prove a point of scale is best
and safe. We don’t need to serve you a latte in a reception in every city on every continent!
We don’t need a worldwide footprint in traditional terms because MR WIAP gives us just
that. It gives us all of the above and the potential for so much more.
MR WIAP really can be your friend. Now am going to have to invent an emoticon for him!