With the ever-increasing global content consumption and the surpassing demand for non-English content over English movies and shows, IMAX is at the forefront of leveraging AI to scale localization on its original content. The entertainment and media industry witnessed a 5% growth to $2.8 trillion in 2023, as per a report by PwC, and is expected to continue expanding at a modest compound annual growth rate of nearly 4% to reach $3.4 trillion over the next five years. Non-English language content is booming even in English markets like the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. For instance, Netflix reported a 90% growth in its viewership of non-English content in the UK over the last three years.
Partnership with Camb.ai
IMAX has taken these trends into consideration and is now exploring localization using AI to attract more viewers. On Monday, the Canadian production theater company, renowned for its massive theaters and immersive movie experiences, announced its partnership with Dubai-based startup Camb.ai. This partnership aims to utilize Camb.ai's AI speech models for translating original content, including documentaries. Camb.ai has already deployed its AI dubbing and speech translation for various live sports events and leagues such as the Australian Open, Eurovision Sport, and Major League Soccer. It offers its Boli model for speech-to-text translation and Mars for speech emulation, available through its DubStudio platform that supports 140 languages, including low-resource ones.Camb.ai's co-founder and CTO, Akshat Prakash, who was a former Apple engineer working on AI and ML models for Siri, co-founded the company with his father Avneesh Prakash last year. He emphasized that Camb.ai takes a different approach compared to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. "They're trying to build very horizontal models that can cover a wide range of tasks. We don't have to do that. Some of our models are less than 100 million parameters and are super specialized," he said. Prakash further explained that Camb.ai pretrained 70% of its models using academic-licensed datasets that are commercially usable, and the remaining 30% involves fine-tuning data from early partners who deploy its models for AI-based dubbing and translation.
He also asserted that Camb.ai is very careful and avoids potentially scraping the internet. "Some companies feel they can get away with it as they build consumer-facing apps or tools. But we don't do that. We have a 'three-layer' approach to provide AI-based translation, comprising the foundation layer of Boli and Mars models, the infrastructure layer hosting these models, and the DubStudio platform for the front end," Prakash said. Camb.ai's Boli takes input speech tokens and produces output text tokens in the translated language while retaining nuances. Once Boli generates the text, Mars translates it into speech using the same audio input signal to capture the actual audio performance, including ambient sounds like the background score of the audience cheering in sports events.
Deployment and Benefits
IMAX will roll out AI translations in stages, starting with high-resource languages. This deployment follows internal testing of Camb.ai's tech on its original content. Mark Welton, president of IMAX Global, said, "While we are only in the beginning stages of the partnership, we will continue to work together to better explore its potential and how it can best move us forward." Welton indicated that the AI deployment will help save on translation costs without disclosing specific details.Camb.ai currently has a team of 50 people. In February, it raised $4 million in a seed round led by Courtside Ventures. Prakash told TechCrunch that the startup is closing a bigger, pre-Series A round to expand its reach and headcount.
