How Media Localizers and Digital Content Producers Scale on OOONA

The consumption of digital content is on the rise, Covid-19 notwithstanding. A Deloitte survey from May 2020 showed 80% of US consumers subscribe to at least one paid streaming video service versus 73% pre-pandemic. And that’s just the US media entertainment segment. Latest reports estimate the global digital content market to grow by more than USD 500bn over the next four years.

A number of digital content producers and media localizers have already prepared for the expected increase in demand by rethinking their workflows and production settings to adapt to the post-Covid era by deploying OOONA. OOONA supplies localization providers with a secure, browser-based management system that includes all the translation, subtitling, captioning, audiovisual, and other tools they need to serve their clients and grow the business.

One such provider is Captionmax, a US-based captioning, description, localization, and transcription provider that partnered with OOONA.

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According to Tony Cleveland, Chief Technology Officer at Captionmax, “Prior to Captionmax selecting and implementing OOONA Manager, we used a solution that was not developed for our industry. The solution was highly customizable but lacked industry-focused development.”

“Captionmax has seen an increase in our capacity to both manage projects across all our service categories” — Tony Cleveland, CTO, Captionmax

Cleveland added, “OOONA provided us the opportunity to leverage the industry best practices and knowledge that have been developed into OOONA Manager, providing Captionmax with important process improvement opportunities aligned with our industry demands, improved visibility across our projects during each phase, and improved project communication.”

Asked if switching to OOONA resulted in a capacity increase for the business, Cleveland replied, “Yes, Captionmax has seen an increase in our capacity to both manage projects across all our service categories as well as delivering our high quality services with a highly trained and diverse workforce.”

He further noted that, as the market continues to compress turnaround times for projects, OOONA made it possible “to increase our capacity and throughput to meet the demands of our clients with the highest level of quality and security.”

On whether OOONA was able to meet the company’s security and compliance requirements, Cleveland said: “OOONA has improved aspects of our current industry leading information security position. The ability to granularly refine and manage access controls at the role or task level directly in the tool enhances our already multi-layered security and least-privileged access controls.”

According to Wayne Garb, CEO at OOONA, “For localization providers looking for a full solution, OOONA also offers OOONA Integrated, a secure web-based platform. It’s basically an end-to-end solution for managing localization, translation, subtitling, and captioning workflows.”

Moreover, using manual processes during crises such as a pandemic has become impracticable, Garb pointed out, adding, “OOONA Integrated automates most manual processes, making operations streamlined and cost-efficient. You can work from anywhere in the world and have instant access to up-to-the-minute data, including full visibility of the status progress and all associated costs for each task.”

“OOONA is ISO 27001 certified and we have General Data Protection Regulation compliance for all our products” — Wayne Garb, CEO, OOONA

What’s more, the platform is “very scalable, from the smallest companies to the biggest,” Garb said. This scalability is supported by the launching of OOONA’s Shop. With its modular, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Garb explained, OOONA allows users to choose only the tools they need for any given project — “and it’s all accessible online from any computer, Windows or Mac, using a simple, intuitive web interface.”

Garb also highlighted that all these functionalities are protected by OOONA Cloud: “OOONA is ISO 27001 certified and we have General Data Protection Regulation compliance for all our products.”

Haven for Audiovisual Localization Talent

In line with OOONA’s mission to serve the localization industry, Garb said they wanted to nurture the talent that powers the industry and address its growing demand for skilled professionals by launching OOONA EDU and The POOOL.

A cloud-based platform specifically designed for subtitling and captioning training, OOONA EDU allows students from leading academic institutions to gain hands-on experience within a truly professional industry ecosystem.

“For the time being, it is rather difficult, if not impossible, to find a cloud-based educational environment on the market to teach subtitle training, such as OOONA EDU,” said Serenella Massidda, Senior Lecturer Translation Studies at Roehampton University, which uses OOONA EDU.

“Students will be immediately ready to work in the localization industry once they finish their studies without the need to retrain them internally in the company that will hire them” — Serenella Massidda, Senior Lecturer Translation Studies, Roehampton University

According to Massidda, the functionalities integrated into OOONA EDU “are the same ones used in the professional world — which in turn means that students will be immediately ready to work in the localization industry once they finish their studies without the need to retrain them internally in the company that will hire them.”

While the academic world has always shown great interest in cloud-based solutions in general, Massidda pointed out that OOONA is unique in that it is “undoubtedly the first professional web-based subtitling platform accessible to the general public, while the majority of the other platforms created from 2012 until now have always been used internally by assets in localization companies.” Hence, OOONA immediately showed great potential to be used in the academic sector as an educational tool, she said.

“During the lockdown, I personally witnessed and experienced firsthand a sudden switch from the desktop software that has always been used in our language labs to OOONA EDU” — Serenella Massidda, Senior Lecturer Translation Studies, Roehampton University

This was especially the case after the pandemic. Massidda explained that the current global situation has highlighted the need for more creative solutions to promote and facilitate working from home: “During the lockdown, I personally witnessed and experienced firsthand a sudden switch from the desktop software that has always been used in our language labs at Roehampton University in London within our Master in Audiovisual Translation to OOONA EDU.”

Massidda added, “I have to admit that the reception on the part of our students was great as they appreciated the user-friendliness of the subtitling toolkit and the chance to be able to work on their subtitling projects from home, with a simple login and a basic Internet access. OOONA made it possible for our students to complete their studies and submit their dissertation projects during the Covid19 pandemic.”

The Roehampton Senior Lecturer said that their students are “now quite conversant with the subtitling tool, and this will make it easier for them to apply for subtitling jobs that require the use of a cloud-based platform — as it is now the case for the majority of the localization companies both using OOONA already or other platforms with similar functionalities.”

To further bolster the industry’s audiovisual localization talent roster, OOONA also launched The POOOL, an AV industry-focused directory, which counts among its users leading translation and localization providers.

“The time and cost of recruiting, testing, and training resources is expected to be less due to The Poool vetting them first” — Michele Smith, VP, SDI Media

According to Michele Smith, Vice President of the world’s largest media localizer by revenue, SDI Media, “The amount of localization required is increasing due to the rapid growth of OTT [over-the-top media] platforms and the increase in the amount of content produced and consequently consumed. The number of current translation resources cannot cover this increase and localization providers are continuously searching for new resources. This includes recruiting, testing and training the resources not just in our tools but teaching them what subtitling is, which is much different than technical, marketing, literary, or government translations.”

Smith noted how The POOOL tests and certifies that the translators on the site are of a quality that would save language service providers (LSPs) time in getting them onboarded. And by working with universities that teach courses in subtitling localization, she said, the resource pool will now have a constant flow of new talent directed toward where they are needed.

The SDI Media VP not only noted how The POOOL’s vetting process lessens “the time and cost of recruiting, testing, and training resources” but also how, “by introducing new university graduates who have been trained on the latest cloud-based subtitling software, acceptance of quickly changing technologies will be a shorter learning curve, thereby saving the LSP’s training and user-acceptance time.”

She concluded, “A neutral, independent database of qualified resources is a win-win for the people entering the industry and the companies that rely on these resources.”