The entertainment and media industry is witnessing a significant surge in demand for non-English language content, with global consumption on the rise. To tap into this growing market, IMAX, the Canadian production theater company, has partnered with Dubai-based startup Camb.ai to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for scalable content localization.

According to a report by PwC, the entertainment and media industry grew 5% to $2.8 trillion in 2023 and is expected to continue its expansion at a modest compound annual growth rate of nearly 4% to $3.4 trillion over the next five years. The demand for non-English language content is growing rapidly, even in English-speaking markets such as the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. Last year, Netflix reported a 90% growth in its viewership of non-English content in the U.K. over the last three years.

IMAX's partnership with Camb.ai aims to capitalize on this trend by using AI speech models to translate original content, including documentaries. Camb.ai's Boli model for speech-to-text translation and Mars for speech emulation will be utilized through the startup's DubStudio platform, which supports 140 languages, including various low-resource languages that do not have significant data on the internet.

Camb.ai's co-founder and CTO, Akshat Prakash, emphasized the startup's focus on specialized models, stating, "Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have a different vision of society... We don't have to do that at all. Some of our models are less than 100 million parameters and are super specialized." Prakash, a former Apple engineer, co-founded Camb.ai with his father Avneesh Prakash last year.

The startup's approach to AI-based translation involves a "three-layer" system, comprising the foundation layer of its Boli and Mars models, the infrastructure layer that hosts these AI models, and then the DubStudio platform for the front end. Unlike other AI-based models, Camb.ai's Boli takes input speech tokens, produces output text tokens in the translated language, and retains nuances, Prakash claims.

IMAX will roll out AI translations in stages, starting with high-resource languages, following internal testing of Camb.ai's tech on its original content. Mark Welton, President of IMAX Global Theatres, expressed optimism about the partnership, stating, "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."

The deployment of AI translations is expected to help save on translation costs, although specifics were not disclosed. Camb.ai currently has a team of 50 people and is closing a bigger, pre-Series A round to expand its reach and headcount, following a $4 million seed round led by Courtside Ventures in February.

The partnership between IMAX and Camb.ai marks a significant step in the entertainment industry's adoption of AI for content localization, enabling the creation of more inclusive and diverse content experiences for global audiences.