Dubbing company promises no more ‘really bad lip sync’
A new media company in Burbank is looking to make domestic and international movies and television shows more accessible for viewers in the United States and overseas.
Just a stone’s throw away from the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank is BTI Studios’ 25th facility in the world — and first studio in the United States. It’s where entertainment studios and content creators can have their films or television shows localized — with audio dubbing and subtitling media in nearly 50 languages — for any global market.
Chris Carey, chief revenue officer and managing director of the Americas for BTI, said dubbing and subtitling have come a long way.
“When we think about voiceovers here in America, it conjures up images of old Japanese horror movies with English dubs and really bad lip sync,” he said.
Carey, who joined BTI in March after almost seven years with Verizon Digital Media Services, said the localization business, where a product or content is adapted to a specific locale or market, is booming, especially in the United States.
Carey said there has been a growing demand for international movies and television shows to be localized in English.
“Content companies ... acquire international content from Korea, Germany and other countries, and we’ll dub it into English and have that be available in the [United States],” he said. “That’s a large factor as to why we opened dubbing studios here in the [United States].”
Dubbing and subtitling movies and television shows may seem like an innocuous task, but Carey said it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that continues to grow as the world’s media consumers and aggregators are looking for new content.
“When you think about subtitling and closed captioning alone, that affects every television network, every channel on every paid TV operator in every country all over the world,” he said.
Having barely been open for a few weeks, BTI’s Burbank facility has already worked on several projects, and studio sessions are fully booked, Carey said.
“The majority of the entertainment content is produced out of Hollywood, so centering ourselves here has really aligned us with our customers,” Carey said.
