New lessons in localisation

These are – to put it mildly – dynamic days for live broadcast production.

Thanks in particular to the dramatic increase in the number and diversity of OTT platforms, the need to customise content with local elements has become significantly more acute – as has the requirement for this to be undertaken with as little an impact as possible on often already overstretched production teams.

With its huge potential audiences and commercial opportunities, it is sports that places the greatest demands upon localisation. For broadcasters and rights holders, it is only through effective and seamless localisation that advertising income can be optimised across devices and territories.

Writing on its website, cloud-based media solutions provider M2A Media neatly encapsulates recent developments around localisation:

“In traditional linear broadcast, localisation of a live event is usually designed around a linked set of playout systems using a single source that is localised during breaks by running multiple playlists in parallel. More recently, the OTT world has…