OOONA Reports Rising Demand for Unified Broadcast Media Localization Services

OOONA, a global provider of professional management and production tools for the media localization industry, reports a successful 2021 with steadily increasing demand for its unified range of products across the entire broadcast and web-based media market. The year has seen accelerating customer migration from desktop software to cloud-connected services, giving localization providers the freedom to work remotely and encouraging team cooperation.

We have achieved our ambition of making OOONA the platform of choice for media localization providers throughout the world, comments CEO Wayne Garb. That success stems from our proven ability to respond promptly to customer demand with carefully researched new features and refinements.

New additions to OOONA during 2021 included a mobile app which allows localization managers to view orders and tasks, assign and reassign work from their smartphones. The app facilitates the management of urgent jobs, which are displayed on handheld devices when the relevant feature is enabled so that approved resources can also self-assign to a task. Viewing orders and assigning work have never been simpler, says OOONA Integrated product manager Maya Venturero.

We have also added support for Japanese timed text editing which was the last piece of the puzzle for us to be able to serve the entire media localization market, adds OOONA Tools product manager Alex Yoffe. Japanese timed text specifications are famous for their intricacies, as text is displayed vertically as well as horizontally and ruby characters and bouten marks need to be positioned precisely. In addition, a combination of full-width and half-width characters is customary and alphanumeric text has its own set of rules.

Third-party partnerships signed during 2021, such as with yellaUmbrella and Evrideo, showcase the versatility of OOONA's offering. In the former case, OOONAs File Convert service was integrated in yellaUmbrella's Nebula and Stellar tools, while the agreement with broadcast channel management service provider Evrideo gives the company's customers access to the full range of OOONA's products.

The OOONA platform was further enhanced during 2021 by API integrations with speech-to-text and machine translation engines from select partners. The company also entered into a proof of concept with translation technology provider memoQ so as to equip its users with powerful term base and translation memory tools that will help them address the market demand for faster turnaround times and larger volumes of content localization.

Security, scalability and a smooth user experience remain OOONA's core area of focus. Aside from moving to AWS and taking advantage of all the features it offers, such as Auto-Scaling Groups to ensure no service interruptions during peaks, and Amazon CloudFront for faster response times, the company also completed a set of stringent security audits in the past year and rolled out a continuous security scanning mechanism as an additional health-check layer. Security can no longer be something you check at the end of the process, it is the core foundation upon which the system is built, checked and rechecked at every step and turn during the development process, explains Adam Tal, OOONA's software architect.

Training takes high priority at OOONA to ensure that customers can get up to speed quickly and easily. A merger agreement was signed in Q3 with Spain-based subtitling training provider GOSUB. Demand for skilled subtitlers and captioners conversant in leading subtitling software is growing exponentially even in countries that do not have a tradition in subtitling, states GOSUB founder Kelly ODonovan. The goal of our training program is to prepare students fully to work directly with language service providers.

Announced early in the year, OOONAs The POOOL is an online database of audiovisual translation talent. It provides fast access to specialists in services such as subtitling, closed captioning, audio description, linguistic and technical quality control, metadata translation, spotting, transcription and post-editing. A so-called talent crunch has been talked about for some time across the media industry, accelerated by the ever-growing popularity of video-on-demand services, Wayne Garb summarizes. An industry-specific web portal is essential if you are trying to find media-savvy professionals with the right experience in translating audiovisual productions between specific languages. The POOOL is configured to be that portal and we look forward to extending its functionality with industry support in 2022.

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