VIDEO CREATORS FIND THEIR VOICEBOX Multilingual Multimedia Agency Breaks Down Language Barriers to Reach a Global Audience
In the digital age, where content is King, it could be argued that video content is the metaphorical Ace of Spades. From Vines and Instagram videos to over the top providers like Netflix and Hulu, there’s an insatiable appetite for digital video but is the language barrier preventing video content creators from truly ‘going global’?
On demand video, quicker internet speeds and social media have all contributed to the meteoric rise of digital video content. There are now over 4 billion YouTube videos viewed everyday - an incredible statistic, eclipsed only by the mind boggling 300 hours-per-minute that are uploaded daily to the video-sharing site.
Yet despite the volume of video content being consumed each day, it’s very rare for a video that’s native in one language to become popular across different language territories. There are, of course, exceptions - most notably the 2012 viral explosion of South Korean sensation Si’s Gangnam Style that was the first YouTube video to rack up a billion views (currently standing at 2.3 billion for those who are keeping count).
Whilst it’s hard to deny the appeal of the Gangnam dance, there are plenty of other ways to reach a global audience other than making a cheesy South Korean pop video; such as voiceovers, subtitles/captions and dubbing.
Although many may associate dubbing with the iconically badly synced Kung Fu movies from the 1970’s, thankfully the industry has benefited from radical advancements. In fact, things have progressed so much that the thriving Bollywood movie industry has recently seen an influx of US blockbusters - dubbed in Hindi - dominate the Indian Box Office.
It’s not just the movie industry that’s benefitting from the progression in multilingual multimedia. VoiceBox, a multimedia cloud based agency, has worked with a global client base that ranges from eLearning providers and branding agencies to entertainment behemoths such as Discovery and Sony Pictures.
“Our cloud based portal allows us to deliver a quality service with greatly reduced production costs. We pass these savings on to our clients which is why we’re attracting both established international businesses and startups with varying budgets”, says Anna Bastek, CEO of VoiceBox.
Bastek, a Polish native and celebrated translation entrepreneur, saw the potential in offering video creators a chance to reach different territories through multilingual services: “We’ve always believed that language isn’t a barrier but an opportunity to reach new audiences.”
With digital video advertising in the US set to reach $7.7 billion this year, the power of video engagement isn’t something that’s been lost on advertisers. By targeting users through their language settings across social media and web browsers, ad agencies are using VoiceBox to voiceover their English speaking ads in different languages including Spanish, French and German.
Managing projects from their UK and US offices, VoiceBox have a global network of native language voiceover and translation artists that work through the company’s cloud portal, a feature which Dorian Williams, VoiceBox’s technical director, describes as a “game changer”. A thirty year veteran of broadcast media, Williams believes that now is easily the most exciting time for content producers to reach new markets: “It’s so easy for our clients, who are often the other side of the world, to upload their video files to our cloud and have them re-versioned, in a new language, for a fraction of the price of what they’d have paid just five years ago. It’s pretty incredible.”
VoiceBox will be one of the 1500 exhibitors, from over 170 countries, who are congregating at this year’s annual IBC Show in Amsterdam. From its humble beginnings in 1967, with just 32 exhibitors, the IBC Show has grown to be the definitive event for the media and broadcast industry to meet their global client's base.
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IBC Issue September 2015
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