HITS

By Robert Holmstrom, Chief Technology Officer, BTI Studios –

A number of recent trends are strongly influencing how we consume TV and films. In turn our response is influencing how that content is provided to us.

Day-and-date release, for instance has not yet been seen on big budget films, although it has been tried out for a few art-house films like A Field in England in the U.K. market in 2013.

However, it’s a stronger trend in television, where OTT platforms already have access to a vast audience almost anywhere there is bandwidth. Such platforms can release a program worldwide. And increasingly they need to.

A TV phenomenon – Take the massive HBO hit Game of Thrones. In 2015, the fifth season was simulcast to 170 countries and to HBO Now users. Widespread piracy was one reason for this but, in any case, when a show can boast such a massive level of awareness, no fan wants to face spoilers for content they have yet to see. Knowing a new episode or season of a hit show is available on a certain day and date just about anywhere is attractive to many fans and a major selling point for the platforms involved.

However, OTT dominance for any new program isn’t yet the norm. A fan of Scandinavian noir isn’t necessarily going to fret over a wait between series. Both The Wire and Breaking Bad grew their audiences slowly and over different platforms. Similarly, even though Outlander could have been seen in the U.K. on Amazon Prime in 2015, it pulled in large audiences when it arrived relatively late on the terrestrial U.K. channel More4 nearly two years later.

Realistically though, this situation can’t last. As Game of Thrones indicates, if a show gains an audience over two seasons, by season three it may be necessary to please almost everyone at the same time. Instead of airing on a per-country, per-channel basis at various times, a much-anticipated show may eventually need to be available anywhere and on any device (smartphone, tablet, laptop or TV) on the same launch date — to anyone willing to pay a subscription fee.

There will be a number of ramifications for these trends over time — to budgets and launch strategies in particular. Ironically, one of the biggest challenges may be in an area that makes up a small portion of the whole production cost, but which has become a very important part of the OTT equation.

How success bred localization

BTI Studios has grown to become one of the world’s largest media localization companies, providing dubbing, subtitling and access services in any language. Localization of shows is often part of a multiple-territory and language release strategy. Although it takes up a very small part of a production budget, if it is badly done it can have an effect out of all proportion to the financial outlay it involves, alienating audiences and giving a platform a bad reputation.

But if the release strategy involves multiple territories and languages simultaneously, there is an additional challenge for the company providing the localization to manage the process both well and in a timely manner.

BTI Studios started out as a small subtitling company with one office in a basement in Stockholm. Now BTI is made up of 21 facilities across the US, Europe and Asia. This was partly a response to a global, multi-platform entertainment market that more than ever requires quick delivery of high-quality localization across multiple markets.

To get localization right in many languages and countries, BTI likes to have a local presence — including local-language speakers — in the country that uses that language. With this local and global set-up, it is vital we have workflows that go between offices, teams and people that are both in-house and external and global.

There is also the additional challenge of getting out all these orders simultaneously — and tracking them all simultaneously — for a globally launched production.

Worldwide web

This brings us to the BTI Hive system, which has allowed us to develop a way to manage localization and access workflows internationally to streamline processes and give 24/7 access across our network of facilities. Together with OOONA — subtitling, dubbing, and localization software experts — we devised a tool that offered the sort of task management BTI Studios required. The resulting platform — BTI Hive — was then further optimized in-house.

BTI Hive is the overarching workflow management system that brings together all the tools and resources across the facilities globally. Subtitling, dubbing, audio description and metadata services each have different processes, and within those, processes can differ between countries.

By having a system for these tools to plug in to, we have created better efficiencies across the entire business, working across several time zones on millions of minutes of content in over 50 languages. More importantly, we’re able to offer clients more transparency as they can log in to the BTI Hive to check the progress of their project, past orders, and financial information.

Using the Hive enables BTI to keep its teams local but to manage global demands and deadlines. The term cloud is overused but you could call it a cloud tool of sorts. It’s a platform that brings everyone together wherever they are in the world and enables them to work at the same pace. Access privileges differ but whether you’re an in-house tech user in Hong Kong, a freelance subtitler in Holland or a dubbing manager in France, the system helps us to manage workloads and deadlines more efficiently for our clients.

We might, for example, create a team called “Swedish Subtitlers” and give them the task of subtitling a specific program in Swedish. A team leader decides who within his or her team will do it. It will then be allocated to a Swedish subtitler, selected by various criteria including the client, the show, and the source language. Throughout the process, this team, other teams and external resources still use the same tool: they all work towards one central point. The same, with a few necessary differences, goes for dubbing.

The strength of being a global company with people all around the world, is that our different teams don’t have to be in one office; we can have a global team of technical QC people sitting in Hong Kong, London and Los Angeles so they can work together 24/7 on programs even if they work always in daytime in their territory.

But the media landscape is not going to stand still. As new territories gain access to broadband and OTT, bringing new markets and new demands for localization, and as greater awareness means more day and date programming in more countries at the same time, there will be more challenges for localization.

There may even be unusual new viewing trends to cope with. There is anecdotal evidence that multi-tasking teenagers may ask for more dubbed shows as they may be only half-watching a screen while doing something else. And of course, new ways to experience content, such as 3D, UHD and virtual reality, are constantly being developed.

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