Sneak Preview: How to Leverage AI for Captioning and Localization
On Tuesday, February 25, Steve Vonder Haar of IntelliVid Research will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel "How to Leverage AI for Captioning and Localization."
The rapid evolution of AI has created vast new opportunities for content owners and creators to cost-effectively make their content accessible across more territories and to more audiences than ever before. The potential for this kind of technology as it proliferates is tremendous, since it makes it far cheaper and easier to customize a platform's content not only to a region but even to a specific group of users. But it also raises new ethical regulatory issues. As the tech leaps forward while the guardrails slowly take shape, how can content owners balance the opportunities and concerns to maximize the promise of AI for captioning, translation, and localization?
Confirmed panelists include:
Steve Vonder Haar is a Senior Analyst with IntelliVid Research, focusing on the markets for intelligent video and enterprise streaming. Steve has covered the online video industry for more than 20 years, publishing more than 200 research reports detailing trends in business video innovation and adoption patterns. Prior to IntelliVid, Steve had served as a Senior Analyst with Wainhouse Research, Research Director of Interactive Media Strategies and as Director of Media and Entertainment Strategies for the Yankee Group. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri Columbia with degrees in Journalism and Economics, and holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas-Arlington. He can be reached at svonder@IntelliVidResearch.com.
Recognizing the maturation of a growing number of Gen AI-powered tools, Steve Vonder Haar said in a LinkedIn post in early 2025, "General tools are giving way to platforms designed to address very specific use cases. From an era of hype, these AI tools are beginning to travel a path to practicality."
Albert Lai is the global Strategic Industries director for Media & Entertainment for Google Cloud. His focus is on helping media organizations transform their business and deliver new audience experiences using cloud and AI/ML.
"Media companies have long used AI/ML for accessibility localization," Lai says. "Now, with powerful multimodal models, they're not just translating, they're transforming content, expanding global reach, and maximizing its intrinsic value."
Sana Afsar is a computer science graduate with over 15 years of software-based product development experience. She specializes in digital media compression techniques and quality control of captions and subtitles in file-based workflows. At Interra Systems she has worked on company's flagship product Baton, Baton Media Player, and Baton Captions translating the domain knowledge into cutting-edge features for media quality control, especially focusing on AI (Artificial Intelligence)-powered QC solutions. Prior to Interra Systems, she has worked for Microsoft IDC and Adobe Systems.
Describing the advantages of natural-language processing and machine-language based tech as deployed in Interra's BATON Captioning solution, Afsar told Jan Ozer in a 2024 interview, "Natural-language processing gives us an edge in generating captions, because sometimes captioned sentences can be very long, and we need to split them into human-readable sentences so that meaningful units are kept together, such that, let's say, first name is not separated from last name, negation is not separated from verb, etc. Apart from this, we need to refine timestamps based on scene-change detection information so that you know that the audio doesn't cross scene changes boundaries. Other ML-based technologies that we use are burned-in text detection and face detection so that we can figure out the proper placement for captions so that it is not hiding any relevant information. Once all this is done, we use machine translation so that we can captions in different languages. These are the main AI/ML components that we use to generate good-quality captions and to check the quality of already-generated captions."
IT professional Tshepiso Seremane, who has worked at ENCA and currently works at Multichoice, has over 15 years of experience. His career began with an internship at Urban Brew Studios, followed by a role as an IT support technician there. He then contributed his expertise to the ENCA news channel before joining Multichoice. Born in Kagiso, Johannesburg and raised in Dobsonville, Soweto, he earned an IT diploma after completing a two-year program that included an internship at a local community radio station, following his high school graduation.
Natasha Potashnik is Vevo’s Head of Data. Overseeing the data science and analytics teams, she is responsible for applying AI, machine learning, and insights to all parts of the business, in close collaboration with measurement and engineering. Previously, Natasha was CTO and Co-Founder of the wellness startup Superbloom, where she spearheaded technology, data science, software, analytics, and product efforts. She also served as an SVP and Partner at Known, where she led a 90+ person media science team using machine learning to plan, buy, and optimize data-driven advertising. Natasha earned her B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University and her PhD from Columbia University.
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