Where Content Comes To Life
Digital Language Services (DLS) staff joined nearly 100,000 fellow media, entertainment and technology industry professionals from 160 different countries at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show April 6-11, 2019 in Las Vegas.
With the tagline “Where Content Comes to Life”, NAB is the premier organization for America’s broadcasters. The annual conference has become the leading event showcasing the latest advancements that transcend traditional broadcasting and fuel the digital storytelling economy.
DLS attended several sessions featuring the latest marketing and technology developments. Here’s a small sampling of technology trends the localization industry is likely to encounter in coming years:
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
While still dominating the gaming sector, both AR and VR are maturing rapidly and emerging as a trend in advertising, especially for games. 360-degree video is also becoming more common and starting to expand outside the gaming industry.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is starting to automate repetitive manual tasks, such as email responses, making them easier and faster. After receiving an email, the “bot” analyzes the text and autocompletes the response by providing sentences or paragraphs for the reply that require minimal editing. This is a major advance from the one- or two-word replies bots currently provide to online emails and messages.
Another way AI was being used was to create metadata for video clips.
Depending on their size, many creative agencies have hundreds of thousands of stock video footage clips in their media repositories. Finding short clips inside larger clips or in a repository can be time consuming, so people started to add metadata to allow for keyword searches. Until now, adding the metadata was a manual process, but now, AI analyzes the footage and adds tags based on what it detects (sees) in the footage.
For example, an agency may have a 30-minute clip of driving along a highway with different scenes. The AI analyzes what is being shown at different times and can generate keywords based on the scenes. When a short clip inside the larger clip is needed, a search can be done for the keyword to find the what is needed for a project.
Speech to Text and Speech Recognition
Quickly fading are the days when humans performed audio or video transcription. Speech to text and speech recognition has improved dramatically in recent years, making transcription faster and less expensive, but human review and editing is still recommended for accuracy and quality.
As transcription becomes more automated and accurate, this will have a positive impact on video localization, such as driving costs down, and speeding up production while maintaining quality.
Marketing Fads for 2019
Marketing agency Peppershock Media discussed recent trends in marketing. For 2019, users are demanding more videos (53%), news articles (46%) and social media posts (44%) over podcasts (9%), long-form content (12%) and blog articles (14%).
Users are demanding higher quality original content. Mini one-minute videos are hot right now, and posting these across content-centric social media platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, is important to engage with your current customers and attract new ones.
Looking ahead to next year’s 2020 NAB conference, several topics will continue to dominate, including new options for storing content in the cloud, cybersecurity in an IoT world, 5G, blockchain and AI and machine learning.
Next year’s NAB 2020 conference is scheduled for April 18-22. It will be interesting to see how far these trends have advanced and what new technologies have emerged. Stay tuned!
