IBC2023 Event Recap and Insights

Hi Thomas, Can you tell us how you feel about participating in IBC 2023 with MediaCAT?

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Thomas: Hello, I'm Thomas Park, Product Manager at XL8. This marked my first IBC experience with XL8. In the past, I've participated in such events as a booth operator representing an LSP. For me, being at the event as part of an AI startup providing solutions for LSPs was a thrilling departure from what I have experienced so far. Given IBC's international broadcasting convention status, I naturally anticipated a significant demand for solutions benefiting broadcasting entities - such as live AI-translation. I was excited as XL8 has already achieved a notable milestone by developing the industry's leading machine translation system tailored for media and entertainment localization. This solution not only excels in offline translation but also seamlessly facilitates live translation. Due to these facts, my expectations for our booth's presence at IBC2023 were quite high.

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How did you feel about MT solutions at IBC 2023?

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Thomas: Before heading to IBC 2023 in Amsterdam, I had a conversation with the managing director of our Seoul office. It was brought to my attention that there was a noticeable shift in the atmosphere, with an increasing number of businesses expressing interest in machine translation (MT) solutions. Remarkably, these are the very businesses that may not have given MT solutions much consideration just a year ago. They are now actively seeking our expertise to pick up where they left off last year.

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While attending IBC 2023, I had the opportunity to validate what our managing director had conveyed about the ‘shift in the atmosphere’. It was genuinely gratifying to witness a substantial number of businesses actively seeking out MT solutions. However, this heightened demand also underscored the intensely competitive nature of the MT market, with nearly every solution provider offering MT solutions either through 3rd party engine integration or as proprietary offerings.

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What is the biggest thought you had when you met customers in person at the booth?

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Thomas: The remarkable news is that, without exception, 100% of our visitors attested that our translations stood out as the most human-like and accurate among all the options they encountered at other booths. What took them by surprise, though, was the revelation that we employ a proprietary MT engine, meticulously trained using curated 'golden' data sourced from the media and entertainment sector. Initially, they inquired if we relied on a 3rd party engine and sought details about it.
This experience highlighted that, even though XL8 boasts the best-performing MT solution, we must actively cultivate new client use cases and complement them with robust marketing efforts to further establish our presence in the market.

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In retrospect, this entire experience has been nothing short of remarkable for me. Engaging with visitors and closely observing our competitors and other AI solution providers yielded a wealth of insights that will greatly benefit XL8 as we evaluate our current product and solution offerings.
Armed with the valuable information we acquired at IBC 2023, we are committed to realigning our strategies to develop a more robust and mature product lineup for the foreseeable future.

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Here at XL8 we can collaborate with a huge range of companies within the media content, entertainment, and communication spaces including - but not limited to - media production studios, streaming services, news agencies, video sharing platforms, multinational corporations and language services. Learn more about how AI machine translation solutions can help your media localization here.

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