Former Netflix exec and now Managing Director of EGA Chris Fetner joins the pod this week to talk about entertainment localization’s new association, the drivers of media loc, and how content owners view the ROI of subtitling and dubbing.
First up, Florian unpacks some bold claims coming out of New Zealand-based LSP Straker’s investor presentation, which placed 20,000 LSPs in the “Dying Zone,” and dismissed 40 larger LSPs (+USD 50m) as providing “global coverage but lacking innovation.”
Esther talks about the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) upcoming open translation tender. WIPO, which spends around USD 5m on translation outsourcing each year, is inviting patent-specialized LSPs from around the world to express interest in bidding for 26m words annually.
The two discuss the week’s investment and funding news, as telemedicine and video remote interpreting (VRI) provider Cloudbreak Health gets snapped up by investors and simultaneously taken public in New York, and transcription and captioning provider Verbit raises (another) USD 60m.
Transcript
Florian: You’ve been in the media loc space for a couple of decades, in post-production related, localization-related roles, including Discovery, the BBC and in your latest roles with Netflix. Why don’t you tell us a bit more about your background, how you came into the space and your previous roles, up to EGA?
Chris: I grew up loving movies and watching lots of entertainment. I was a bit of a latchkey kid during the time when VCRs became a big thing and I had a sister who worked for a video store, so that gave me a lot of free time and access to a lot of content. I used to love watching TV shows and movies and that’s how you got into the business. I was a highly technical person and I enjoyed technical things, and so I gravitated towards fixing technical problems and large-scale operational problems.
My first experience with localization was actually quite pedestrian. It was just changing US versions of shows for Discovery Channel into UK versions, which sounds like it wouldn’t be much in the way of localization, but we had to change measurement units and general colloquialisms and things like that. I have to hand it to Discovery, they were very quick to realize that localization was relevant to how something resonated with a member of the population or a viewing population. It was called the UK re-versioning project and they took the time. They would re-edit in some cases, they put new graphics in and I worked on that project fairly early in my career.
Then I found myself working for the BBC, where I had less to do with localization, although I did a little bit with Latin American Spanish because at the time that was actually our run. That whole localization effort was run out of the Americas because it was primarily servicing Latin America through the US sales office. I used to handle a little bit of that work.
It wasn’t until I joined Netflix and helped with them launching in 190 countries, that I became very acquainted with localization and the importance of it, in terms of finding audiences, opening up markets, and also, particularly for streaming platforms, making sure that people understand localization. The quality of localization is very relevant to how people feel about your product. If it’s done badly, they don’t say X company did that badly, or the studio provided a bad asset, they say Netflix is a bad product because it’s not very well done in terms of the localization. That was the lesson we learned very early on, particularly when we launched in Latin America. We set about to change the industry and make it very quality-focused, and try to make sure that we got assets that were really good.
I had been at Netflix a long time and it was time for me to move on and do something different. I was in a very good place, with regards to my stock participation at Netflix. I wasn’t ready to completely not work at my age, but I wanted to find something that was a good fit for me, a good fit for my interests and aspirations and also skills. I have a huge affinity for localization. I think the people that I meet in this industry have two really great redeeming qualities. They are usually very intelligent because they’re multilingual. Especially people that are professionally multilingual, they tend to be very smart people, and they’re very passionate, they love what they do. Sometimes that passion can be complicated to work with, but generally speaking, they are people that want to do an awesome job and they really feel an affinity for the work they do. Those were two great characteristics that made me think I’d really like to continue to engage with this industry. That connective tissue to that population or that industry was the one area that I felt like I would really miss and pine for after leaving Netflix. When this came about as a viable opportunity, I was very excited by it because it allowed me to continue to engage with an industry that I really have an affinity for.
Slator 2021 Language Industry Market Report
Esther: Talking about EGA, what was the idea behind it specifically and can you tell us a bit about some of the people in the companies involved in the association?
Chris: Today the EGA is 73 companies, member companies, plus a lot of actual individual professionals. It’s not only companies, there are a growing population of individuals that are involved in localization that are joining. The general impetus behind the organization is the fact that localization has never been more relevant as global platforms are growing. Next year there will be nine new streaming platforms that will launch, and in some cases, their actual international expansion has accelerated as a result of COVID because some of their domestic businesses have been negatively impacted like theatrical releases or theme parks, or other things that they generally have contributors to their P&L. They’re actually moving forward streaming because that’s something that people can continue to do in the pandemic. There’s never been a higher demand for this service, and so it seemed like a good time, and it’s also a growing industry. It’s growing in terms of its contribution to the entertainment financial ecosystem.
There’s never been a better time to try to get more organized around this particular narrow subset of translation services. You outlined that in your podcast previously. It’s different than other forms of translation and before it became this giant industry, it was a good time to try to bring some order to it, get some organization around it and try to get some standards and some other things that would not only benefit the industry but also benefit the clients of these services, consumer of these services. That was really the goal of the organization and I’d say that the founding companies were all very early parties that were either interested in doing this, but couldn’t find the right leader for it, or there had been some attempts in other forums to get a group together. I think it was just a perfect storm of my availability, and interest for six or seven key companies to pull this together, and then the perfect timing with the growing need for this particular set of services.
Esther: You mentioned a bit about standards there, so it sounds like that’s going to be one of your areas of focus. Can you tell us generally what the mission is, and what some of the operational outputs of the association are going to be?
Chris: Obviously, there’s a lot of non-standard assets. It’s more of a problem on the audio localization side, so the dubbing and access services, less so on subtitling. There’s something called M&E tracks, which is all of the audio tracks except for the dialogue. There’s a mapping exercise of which tracks are aware, which assets are present, which are missing. What ends up happening, as an example, is a dubbing company will get these assets and they’ll spend two or three days cleaning them up because they’re so non-standardized, and it’s in an environment where you’re already very pressed for time and it’s challenging to get the best assets created because of the time constraints. It’s lost time that could be put into making the dub itself better. There’s a general opinion that if we can get the studios to all agree on what an M&E configuration should look like, that ultimately it will yield better dubs because that time that could have been used to make the mix a little bit better or to enhance some of the performances, is lost just cleaning up a mess. It’s those things where we can improve either quality by freeing up time or adding scale.
There’s a lot of work that goes into creating good bids because people will count loops. That’s typically how people bid for dubbing, they’ll count loops. You’ll see the same piece of content and one company will count loops a certain way and end up with 500 loops. Another one will count it a different way and have 700 loops, so which one is right? Maybe if we could come up with some standardized methods for counting loops or submitting bid templates or assignment of rights. There’s this thing with rights and every studio has their different contract for the assignment of rights that are 97% the same. If we can work with the studios to optimize that 3%, everybody can be happy. Could we get to a place where local studios don’t have to track 20 different assignments or right documents? Is that a huge win for the industry? Yes and no, but what it does do is allow the administrative overhead to take away from the creative process to get a little bit more streamlined and bring a little more scale to the industry and make it more efficient. Some of these things are not huge wins, they’re incremental, but it still results in a benefit to the retelling of the story.
Slator 2021 Video Localization Report
Florian: That’s a lot of stakeholders to bring together. Standards, also in the non-media portion of the localization industry has always been a big issue. What’s the governance model of EGA to bring all these people together and make decisions and next year, move forward in those decisions to implement them? How do you bring all these people together?
Chris: It’s a challenge. I’ve been on the SMPTE board of governors for six years now, which is the standard body for motion picture television. I am often frustrated and even SMPTE themselves are often frustrated with the speed of getting standards ratified. The governance, specifically for EGA, is a committee-based organization, which means there’s a committee for standards. That committee is comprised of all the members that choose to participate. The committees will be governed democratically by the membership. EGA’s main focus is to create the framework and to ensure that the work is getting done, the cadence of the meetings is happening appropriately and everything else. We definitely intend to have all the stakeholders as members and then have all of the members run the organization through committee. It means that it may take a little longer to get these things done because you’re trying to build consensus, but the good news is that the pyramids weren’t built in a week, but they’re still around.
If you can go through the effort of trying to get people aligned and feel like they’re invested in the standard, it’s their standards that lasts a long time once they’re done. Media localization is not going to go away, it’s a growing industry. If we can get the standards established early days, then the work, time-consuming as it may be, will pay long-term dividends. That’s really the goal. It really is an organization not run by me. I’m not going to pencil 10 standards that I think are really important. Those ones that I mentioned are ideas, but they may not be the ones that find traction within the organization, and so it’ll be up to the committee to make those decisions.
Florian: Was it hard to get everybody to sign up in the first place for a new association or was it more we’ve always been missing this particular forum or was it a lot of back and forth?
Chris: It’s interesting. No, it wasn’t that hard. I was surprised. We started working on this in October, we hope to launch in November. I remember telling the board of advisors, if I could get 20 or 25, including 10 that had already signed up as founding members, so if I could get 10 to 15 more, I would consider it a pretty good success for a year where it’s been pretty bad with COVID-19 and everything else. When I looked down and it was 60 on the launch, I was astonished. It was a reality check moment and then to have added 13 more in the weeks since we launched, it’s been pretty phenomenal. I really think it’s a reaction to the desire to have more connective tissue to the people that they’re retelling the stories for.
We have great companies, family-owned companies, some in their third generation of doing localization. We have DINT in Chile, which is nothing more than Christian loving what he does, he’s the CEO, and has a huge affinity for it. We have Dubbing Brothers in France, they’re in their second generation of doing this and the Taïeb family, a huge family that’s involved in localization throughout the industry. It’s just a reaction to wanting a place where they can all come together and try to connect more with the people that they’re retelling their stories for. It’s been a little bit like a rubber band that was stretched for many years, and then all of a sudden it’s snapped back together and it’s actually been really interesting to see and really rewarding to work on it and see how excited people are by the idea of having a forum, where they can all work together and concentrate on some of the big issues in the industry.
Florian: Do you think OTT and streaming stretched the rubber band a lot over the past 10, 15 years? What has been the impact on that, before it was maybe a little cottage, now it’s cool and techie? What are your thoughts?
Chris: I think that it has become more relevant because OTT has dramatically changed the business paradigm. Pre-global OTT platforms, generally speaking, their studios sold content into local markets, and then they mostly forgot about what happened to the content. Since the deal was done, it was a flat-rate deal, or it was an output deal or, there was some business paradigm that meant there was no more money coming in, so whatever happened to it, happened.
For instance, my partner’s from Denmark and she grew up watching DR. Basically, all the major studios would sell into Denmark, to DR or TV2, and then they would just do the subtitles. DR and TV2 had their own subtitling department, and they would just do their own work or they would buy DVDs that the distributor had sold. All that work was very local, and I think the difference now is that OTT platforms have made it a bigger industry. It is more international because it’s hard for OTT platforms to scale and do deals with a hundred different vendors, it’s much easier to do them with 10 or 15 big vendors. There’s been a little bit of that, but I think OTT platforms have brought a lot of opportunity for growth.
Most localization companies, if you look at the last 10 years, are better off now than they’ve ever been. You’re seeing this with the appetite from institutional investors, private equity guys and venture capital guys. They don’t get into this business because they don’t see a future in it, they obviously have looked at the market and see that there’s an appetite for something there and that there’s a continued need for that service. I would say that at Netflix, we tried really hard to have a great partnership with all of our companies that provided services. We tried as much as we could to have a good working relationship with them that valued the contribution they made to our ability to scale globally. I don’t know if we caused tension, but we certainly caused attention to the industry and got to people, which then may have created tension in a manifest way. It was more about that suddenly this is an industry that if you want to grow your business globally, you have to connect with it in some way or another.
Esther: I’m curious to know whether that’s changed at all. I imagine it has done in some way if you’re talking about in the past, content would go out to local markets, and then content owners weren’t so concerned with what happened afterwards. Do the content owners and the streaming platforms now think about localization and globalization slightly differently? For example, is it perceived as the revenue driver all the time, or is it still sometimes a case of, we do it because we have to do it?
Chris: It really depends on the maturity of the platform. In the early days when you want to launch, it’s a cost of acquisition of a new customer, you look at it and you say, if we want to be relevant in the Latin American market, we have to localize in Spanish. The only way that we can grow in a material way, is to be in their language, otherwise, you’re looking at just getting a very small percentage of the English speaking people that have a credit card who have a general interest in the content that you’re offering. Take CuriosityStream, which is a new OTT platform that offers non-fiction and documentary-style shows, if they wanted to launch in Latin America without Spanish and you were to draw their Venn diagram, it’s going to be people that speak English pretty well, that have a credit card, and like that particular genre of shows. The overlap is going to be fairly small, and so in the early days it’s a cost of acquisition to localize.
All businesses, when they get to the top of the S curve and start to decelerate, look at all their costs and they start to go through this exercise of cost optimization, and what makes sense now that they are no longer growing. It’s a dilemma because they only have two knobs that they can turn, one is to sell their cost of goods lower. They have to reduce costs or they have to raise the costs, they have to change their RPU and that’s a very dangerous knob to mess with, because once you start turning it too much, you lose people. You’ve spent all this time trying to acquire customers and then once they voluntarily churn out, getting them to come back can be very challenging. The general bias of all companies and this is true of all industries, is that once they decelerate, they start to look at cost optimization. In which case they start to cut things they value less.
Sadly localization has traditionally been one of the things that is reduced in quality and costs until it becomes painful, then once there is some signal that they’ve gone too far, then they correct. A good example is iflix in Asia. Iflix made a very bold decision a year ago or so, that they were going to do all their subtitling with machine-translated subtitles. It got very painful very quickly, and they retreated from that position within three or six months and went back to human translation or some hybrid machine-human editing. Unfortunately, that’s how it goes, it’s a cost of acquisition in the early days, and then it becomes a cost optimization model. If you don’t value it, then you won’t pay for it.
I think that is a very legitimate risk for localization because people have tended to think of localization like buying gasoline. When you’re driving your car, and all of a sudden you see that gauge hit a quarter of a tank, you need gas, and so where’s the petrol station? There’s one right there but is there a price relative to the market normal? You wouldn’t stop and buy it if it was 70% over the market, but if it’s the market price and it’s convenient, then you use them. You have no particular affinity for that gas station, it’s just one that’s there. I’m not as familiar with all of the localization industry, but that’s probably a paradigm that is true in most parts of the localization industry. There’s probably some pockets like literary translation, or maybe legal contract translation, that those decisions aren’t made on those vectors. Generally speaking, people treat localization like a commodity and they buy it like a commodity. That’s a disservice to it, particularly in the entertainment space, but probably in all parts of localization.
Esther: One of the things that strikes me is that, as a media entertainment company, you probably know if you’ve gone too far because you’re going to get market feedback on the quality of subtitles and on the quality of the dubbing. How does that kind of audience and market feedback factor into the process of managing your suppliers or generally the decisions that the companies are making with regards to localization?
Chris: I can’t really speak to all of the nuances of Netflix because there’s a lot of stuff that’s confidential. I can tell you that generally speaking, people pay attention to that feedback and they are interested in it. If you make a B2C product, you want your customers to love your product and part of it is that they will love it in another language if you’re a big successful company. There’s a chess show on Netflix called the Queen’s Gambit. It’s a phenomenon right now, and I believe it is a hit in 63 countries, it’s number one for Netflix in 63 countries right now. Now simple math means that it’s a hit in roughly 59 countries that don’t speak English. That means that it was very relevant, and it was obviously localized. It was a great show, but it could have been butchered in another language and people wouldn’t have watched it. That means that the localization worked for that piece of content.
I do think that feedback is relevant and I’ll give you an example of the way I would think about it. If I was a movie director, I would want to know how my show has done in the United States and how it has done in other countries and what might be driving that delta. Sometimes it’s going to be a story that people can’t get, they don’t understand it because it’s a very American or a very British phenomenon. If it should be a show that is universal and human in nature, then I’m going to start to look at who did my localization work because localization is half the movie. In another country, especially in a dubbed country, it is literally 50% of the movie. Movies are made up of video and audio, and it’s 50% of the experience. If I’m a creative talent, I’m going to really want to know who’s the custodian of my story. Who is the custodian of the audio mix that sat in an audio suite for six months and mixed it and made sure that it got done the way I wanted it, and done faithfully.
Increasingly, this feedback loop that you talk about as a consumer is going to be really relevant, not only to the platforms but also to the creative talent. One of the things that we will probably do in EGA is to create better ways to have that feedback loop published and for people to be aware of it. I don’t know what those will be yet. They’ll obviously be defined by the insights committee, but there is a committee within the EGA that is particularly focused on this problem set of how we get a better signal on how the localization industry is doing for the creative community. It doesn’t exist today, but you can look at Facebook or Reddit, you can look at customer complaints. Then the best thing you can look at if you’re a platform is abandonment. How many people watched it? When did they stop watching it? How fast did they stop watching it? What were the trends? One of the superpowers that Netflix has always had is incredible insight into their viewer consumption model. You look at whether completion was very high in this language, or very low in another language. It is a directional indicator that there’s something more to look at, but localization is very hard to figure out, in terms of, was it good or bad?
Florian: There’s also a big responsibility. I watch shows with my kids, they get part of their language learning through dubbed content. I’m a bit of a language geek, but if it’s really poorly dubbed or poorly translated I’m a little concerned, since English is very verbal and German should be a little less. That’s not really how you actually speak, so I’d move on to something that’s slightly better. You mentioned the iflix example with MT, and that seems to have been a fail, but what’s your take on, for production, cloud dubbing, for example, or AI technologies, MT for subtitling generally. Then there’s this whole new thing around synthetic voices and machine dubbing. While it’s great and you guys play around with it, is it going to hit production anytime soon? What are your thoughts there?
Chris: I’m very careful about predicting technology because I remember in 2007 that MIT, one of the best technology institutions in the United States, said that it would be 20 years before there would be autonomous automobiles. We’re talking 2027 and both of my cars drive themselves well ahead of schedule. It’s really hard to predict these things, but I will say that my general thought is that entertainment machine translation will arrive roughly at the same pace of when you would read a best-selling book that was completely generated by a Google engine. That’s still probably a ways away because there’s something about the human element of translation that people can sniff out fairly quickly, something that just wasn’t touched by human hands or human minds or hearts. That is something that is very apparent, but I think automation and technology, making the human process more efficient, is something that is already happening, and should continue to be embraced.
On the machine translation piece, making humans better at doing the human part is probably happening now and will continue to become a big factor. I remember at a language and media conference, somebody had a quote. They said that computers are really good at doing things that are hard for humans, big math computations and things like that, and they’re actually quite bad at doing things that are easy for humans, like interpreting if somebody’s happy or sad or having empathy. I think that’s really true, and so to put that in a category, I’d say it’s already happening and if it’s used correctly to make humans better at doing their work, I think that’s a good thing.
As far as synthetic voices, for certain types of content, maybe audio description, I remember reading an article that said in a weird way, people that are visually impaired actually prefer synthetic voices. I don’t know if this is true or not, this was an opinion piece, so please don’t troll me on this later. What I have heard is that they enjoy it because it’s the world they live in, a lot of assistive tools that they’re already familiar with are synthesized. It helps them differentiate between what is dialogue in the content and what is an assistive tool to help them interpret it better. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what I’ve heard and it sounds logical to me. The thing to remember about content is it’s not all the same. There’s some content that costs $500 a minute, and there’s some that cost $5 million a minute. Probably on the low end of that tier, synthetic voices will find a home faster than on the high end of that spectrum. A relevant thing to consider is that this is a spectrum and some of these technologies will find a home faster on one end of the spectrum than the other.
As far as cloud computing goes or cloud dubbing, when those offerings can replicate the experience of dubbing in a studio, they’ll have relevance. One of the things you’ve seen with COVID is people in the United States are moving all over the world. People are leaving Los Angeles and going to move to Idaho or Texas or somewhere else. If those technologies allow really great professionals that would otherwise feel compelled to live in a region, to move or live somewhere where the cost of living makes more sense, or they have a personal affinity to live somewhere, but they can get relatively the same experience in the same quality of work, those will find traction. I do know that COVID has accelerated a bias to try them, and also an investment in making them work better. There’s been companies that have been toying with it for a long time, but there wasn’t an impetus, there wasn’t a reason to do it, and now you’re seeing it.
Nobody could have ever seen COVID coming, nobody did. What it has done to the industry, is it thinks a lot more about disaster recovery. Especially entertainment because people have craved entertainment more so than ever, every metric around viewing has gone up. The general interest in entertainment has been constant, and so people have started to look at these tools as a disaster recovery possibility if nothing else. There are also a lot of complexities on the other side of it too. There’s some people who like going into the studios and so it’s a complicated thing, but I definitely think that there will be a growth in remote dubbing. In very much the same way that file-based deliveries became normal after the accident in Japan that wiped out the tape manufacturing facility for Sony. In 2008 or 2011, there was a tsunami that crushed the factory that made videotapes. Everybody who was sending masters around on HDCAM SR had to quickly find a new way to send content. The content couldn’t stop moving and so instead it just became file-based. Everybody had been wanting to be file-based for a long time, but nobody could get the CapEx or could get a paradigm shift and then suddenly it became an imperative.
Florian: That was a global supplier, they had a sole supplier? There was one company in Japan that did that?
Chris: Everybody was on the fence that eventually things would go file-based. There’s probably a white paper at Harvard Business School about it, but Sony had consolidated all their manufacturing to one facility because they didn’t see a huge future for manufacturing videotapes. When that tsunami hit, it wiped the factory out. It was the same one that wiped out the nuclear reactor in Northern Japan. When that happened, you couldn’t get these videotapes anymore. Almost instantly, if you didn’t have tape stock already on hand, you couldn’t put out masters. People were taking old masters and erasing them and rerecording. Then all of a sudden, within six months of that shortage of tape stock, the supply ran out. The tools to make new ones were gone, and so people went file-based. Luckily, I hope we’re going to have a vaccine. If we didn’t have a vaccine and we continued to get more and more waves, I think remote dubbing would really be rooted. If it was another six months, I think it would be a complete shift, and may never come back to it.
Esther: I wanted to briefly revisit something that you touched on earlier, which was investment in the media localization, globalization space. How do you think investors are seeing this space and why do they find it interesting?
Chris: I think what you’re seeing is big investors. Shamrock and Visual Data just got endeavor partners I think that basically bought into them. Then you have SoftBank, you don’t get much bigger than SoftBank in terms of investment. Then Carlyle started it off with the purchase of BTI some time ago and then ALTOUR, the Swedish investment company. They tend to be very good at looking at trends and looking at growth trends and they tend to look at three to five-year windows, and there’s really no way that you can slice the media and entertainment space over the next five years and not see massive growth.
Next year alone, you have BritBox going international, they just launched in Australia, but they have aspirations to go to other countries in 2020. You have CuriosityStream. You have Peacock getting ready to launch internationally. Amazon will continue to expand, Apple plus will continue to expand. These are big companies that are making big commitments to international growth. Everybody realizes rightly that localization is going to be essential to being successful. To some extent they look at it and say, we can get in that window before they get to that deceleration curve in the S curve. There’s this window, and it aligns very well with their typical models of investment, which are three to five years. Another one is platinum, and with the locks, these are all big companies that have big positions. They just look at it understandably and say the next five years there will be tremendous growth and we can be in and out of that market in that timeline. I think it’s just a very simple understanding that the industry is essential to help support the aspirational goals of these other bigger media companies and so it’s a good place to make an investment.
Florian: Chris, you’ve been at this now with EGA for a couple of months?
Chris: Seven weeks.
Florian: Seven weeks. What’s the roadmap, let’s go with 12, 18 months? What are the immediate steps and then what are some of the bigger priorities in 2021?
Chris: Certainly we need to get ourselves organized with that committee landscape that I discussed earlier. Then we want to spend energy in education and that’s partially education for the industry itself. Trying to do a professional development type of education. Then it’s also a lot of engagement and education to the creative community. I live in an area of Hollywood where I have a lot of neighbors that are in the industry. When I first was approached about this, I did a pressure test with some of my neighbors and I said, hey, do you know what happens to your content when it leaves the United States and overwhelmingly they didn’t, or they had a very limited understanding of it.
There’s a great Graham Norton clip with Zach Efron, and he’s talking about the voice that plays him in Spain, and I don’t want to disparage anybody, but you can watch the clip. He says, look, I’m not happy with this fixed voice that now plays me forever. I think that one of the things we want to do is to engage with those communities, to help them understand how the industry works and if they’re unhappy with elements of it, where they can actually lend a voice or influence to how that work gets done. That’s a lot of engagement and outreach to the creative community, a lot of education both internally and externally.
Then the other big thing, there’s some low hanging fruit standards that we want to work on and we’d like to get one of those done in 2021. We have a full 12 months to try to tackle that. Maybe we won’t go after one of the prickly ones, but we’ll maybe try to figure out one that we can win quickly. The other thing is really that insights piece. Really starting to get a better understanding of the importance of good quality localization, in terms of consumer impact. I hope the insights committee will come up with one study that we can do maybe in the figs that is a propensity to spend type study. Maybe we’ll look at the figs and we’ll maybe survey a thousand people or 2000 people and say, how important is localization to you and do you feel like in general that you’re being well-served as a non-English native speaker, or could you get more benefit out of a little bit more quality? We’ll do those things, we hope to work with a lot of organizations to achieve those goals.
One of the things that I’m dealing with right now is to find the right partners that are similarly interested and that can help us facilitate the mission of EGA. One of the things that is important to me is that we’re not seen as representing any one sector or area of entertainment localization, but actually we represent the whole ecosystem. When the whole ecosystem gains affinity with the creative talent, that’s good for everybody. We want to find some strategic partners that we can work with, that have alike interests and really try to make the whole industry regarded in a more highly, more prestigious way and more critical to the enjoyment of entertainment globally.
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