What I learned at IBC 2022
By John ButterworthJohn Butterworth, Vice President Sales Engineering of XL8
Oct 14, 2022
I met a few old friends and I made many new friends attending IBC2022 in Amsterdam. In all the years that I’ve worked in this industry, this was my first IBC show and I worked our XL8 booth all day, every day. I learned some important lessons:
- Give yourself more time at the airport in Amsterdam.
- Uber was not as reliable as the rental car.
- The cups of coffee are never big enough and the beers are usually too big.
- A tuna salad with roast beef sandwich works pretty good when you are starving and only have a few minutes before the next demo.
- My colleagues, Tim YH Jung, Josh Pine and Janice Pearson are tireless, dedicated leaders and I’m lucky to be able to travel with them.
What would I do differently next year?
- Hire a bus and a driver to take everyone I could to dinner each night and avoid the Uber delays.
- Bring more business cards.
- Partner with a Telco to give free high speed internet to everyone!
You know what else I learned? That our MediaCat and EventCat product offerings really resonate with people. I ran out of business cards and after 100 or more demos on the stand, here is my takeaway on the impact of XL8 at IBC:
- Machine translation is a big deal for live streaming. We demonstrated our LiveSubs solution to so many new contacts that it's hard to keep count. People from all over the world were excited by our multi-language, automated subtitles. We even had a separate stand at the Zixi booth showcasing our latest live integration.
- We’re good! Several new customers stepped up to our booth and said that after their own independent review, our translation tested the best and they were ready to sign up!
- Pass-through integration is hot. Many platforms want to integrate our solution for their customers. Since we are usage based, not a licensing model, that’s great news.
- Our translation quality surprises people. Whether you are a content owner delivering straight from our platform, or a translation provider looking to use Machine Translation to save time and money on the initial steps, the results we give because of our 100% curated data and context awareness are impressive.
- Everyone has a favorite. Sync is my favorite feature, especially where we can match the text in a transcription file to a media file. However, I spent a ton of time showing off our synthesized voice offering as well as our LiveSubs.
Let me close with my elevator pitch.
We are a machine translation startup that has great quality because we focus only on media and entertainment. Our data comes from professionally translated content, not “things” scraped from the internet. In addition to continually improving our language models, we’ve introduced context awareness that makes for a more natural and correct translation. Whether you are looking to distribute directly from our platform, or post edit the content, XL8 offers high quality translation and an integrated toolset offering Sync, Translate and Dub. Check us out at MediaCAT.
See you next year!
