7 Years of XL8: A World of Stories, Powered by MediaCAT
What if a story never had to stay in one language?
In 2019, XL8 began with that question. We built AI translation engines made for movies and series, where a single line of dialogue carries emotion, humor, and culture. Translating words was never enough. We wanted the story to feel the same in every language.
From engine to platform
As our technology grew, so did our ambition: why not make the whole localization process easier?
In September 2022, we launched MediaCAT, bringing transcription, translation, subtitling, and dubbing into one platform. In 2023, MediaCAT Projects made it easier for teams to work together on multilingual content. That same year, XL8 won two DEG EnTech Awards, one recognizing MediaCAT as an Emerging Technology and one honoring our engineers for Technology Innovation.
Recognized by the industry, trusted by professionals
In 2024, MediaCAT was named Best Product in AI & Data at the Product Awards. In an independent evaluation of eight neural machine translation engines, XL8’s engine ranked first.
Recognition matters, but trust matters more. Partnerships with Cineverse and 2G Digital Post, and the integration of our AI Sync and Translate APIs into OOONA’s localization platform, brought MediaCAT into professional media workflows. In 2025, we added an enhanced subtitle editor and Automated Quality Control (AQC), helping linguists catch errors faster and keep every subtitle consistent.
This year, MediaCAT went to IBC 2026 in Amsterdam to show how AI can make media workflows both faster and more secure. MediaCAT is now also available on AWS Marketplace, with the “Deployed on AWS” badge.
The numbers tell one story
Last year alone, MediaCAT:
Supported 31,144 projects. That’s about 85 new projects every single day.
Synced 23,788 hours of content. That’s enough to play video nonstop for over two and a half years.
Translated more than 5.28 billion characters. That’s roughly the length of 10,000 novels.
Across all its services, XL8’s AI has now helped translate more than 1 million hours of content for over 1,000 companies and organizations.
The people tell another
Behind every project is a person: a subtitler meeting a tight deadline, an editor polishing a joke so it still lands in another language, a distributor bringing a series to a new market. MediaCAT handles the repetitive work so they can focus on what only people can do: the tone, the timing, the cultural details that make a story feel at home.
And their content always stays theirs. We never use customer data to train our AI, and MediaCAT is protected by SOC 2 and TPN Gold certifications.
Seven years later, more stories are waiting
Streaming services, studios, distributors, and independent creators all need faster ways to reach global audiences without losing quality. MediaCAT keeps growing with them, shaped by years of research, industry partnerships, and feedback from the people who use it every day.
To our team, customers, and partners: thank you for being part of this journey. Because every story deserves an audience, and every new language opens the door to someone new.
Seven years of innovation. A world of stories still to discover.
XL8 and MediaCAT: Your Story, Worldwide.