Voice Dubbing Challenged by Global Content Explosion

A couple of pieces of news have caught our eye lately – separate but related in important ways for the global dubbing industry.

First, in a fascinating and data-rich report that everyone should take some time to read, the Motion Picture Association of America reports that in 2022, there were more than 1,800 original series released, up 15% in just one year. That’s just streaming content – not including films produced and released worldwide last year.

The explosion of content is continuing, and even growing further, with newer streaming players like Paramount+, AppleTV+, Discovery Plus and Peacock adding to ever-increasing demands on content.

Second, a late 2021 study by the Entertainment Globalization Association found that 61% of 15,000 viewers they surveyed in France, Italy, Germany and Spain – a huge sampling of consumers – felt the localization quality they encountered was “poor,” and as a result 65% of them had stopped watching a film or TV show.

Localization and dubbing are crucial to continuing the expansion of international programming that crosses borders, a seismic cultural shift that has had enormous successes and huge impact: Series like Squid Game and Money Heist have been pop-culture events around the globe. And yet, despite that success, our industry is challenged to continually improve our work.

Stellar dubbing, in particular, opens up programming to viewers who can’t or choose not to read subtitles; but if they’re giving up on watching in such high numbers, they’re sending a clear message that we need continual process improvement.

One of our core beliefs at VoiceQ – which we think makes us fundamentally different from many other companies who provide dubbing support technology – is that every single dubbing professional has an important contribution to make to this improvement.

We’ve created VoiceQ Writer and VoiceQ Cloud to offer greater accessibility and flexibility to script translators and adapters.

As we’ll explore in more detail in upcoming blog posts, writing professionals are a crucial piece of the creative puzzle that unlocks greater success in dubbing. VoiceQ Writer and VoiceQ Cloud are all-in-one script management tools that currently allow thousands of  translators, adapters and creative directors worldwide to deliver final dialogue that more closely reflects the original on-screen words.

Supporting the other end of the creative pool our latest application VoiceQ Actor, lets voice performers – often the last step of the dubbing process – take a greater, more active role in bringing a performance to life. By allowing tremendous flexibility to perform, rehearse and review line readings from just about anywhere, VoiceQ Actor gets performers more comfortable with a project, and gives them a greater voice in dubbing (yes, the pun is intended).

We’re such strong proponents of the role performers can play in improving the dubbing process, we’re making VoiceQ Actor available FREE for voiceover artists until February 2023. We hope you’ll encourage any performer you know to register, download and try the software (for MacOS) themselves.

Like almost every job and function on the face of the planet, dubbing has been dramatically affected by the pandemic. We believe many of those changes have been good for the industry as a whole.

Gone are the days when an adapter has to make educated guesses about whether the words they’ve chosen will match to “lip flap,” and be frustrated by seeing the end result. We’re past the stage when a performer, carefully cast for the role, has to stand in front of a microphone and struggle on the spot to get words to fit within the frame count.

We believe our VoiceQ tech suite helps contribute to stronger creative results in the final dubbed product … and when a series looks and sounds its best, more people watch. And when more people watch, everybody wins.

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