The streaming wars have mostly been fought on catalogue size and quality. The fight that matters now is reaching new markets through localisation and accessibility, and the one after that is keeping audiences engaged through discoverability and user experience.
Competing in new markets takes a library built for them
Streaming platforms are increasingly looking beyond their primary market to grow their user base, and doing it well requires a rich library of global titles, localised so they feel made for the new audience. Just look at Netflix, which invests heavily in localisation to make sure it has a robust library in every region it is growing in.
That changes what localisation is. It has been treated as an operational task, something to complete once the content is made and oftentimes sold. In a fight for new markets, it has become a growth strategy because a platform can only compete with the titles it has localised.
A winning strategy requires AI and expert linguists
A truly global library cannot be localised the old way. AI changes how the work is produced, with workflows built to handle far more titles in far more languages.
The obvious worry is that this speed will cost quality and cultural nuance. But that worry leans on a myth: that all linguistic work done by humans was great before AI arrived. It wasn’t.
There have always been linguists who rise above the rest, and others who don’t. AI has made the weaker performers more efficient and left the best in the business asking whether it helps them at all. We are in an adjustment period, with long-established workflows being put into question.
What stays constant is who decides whether a localised version is good enough. Expert linguists review the output, and they can tell whether it will be accepted by the audience it was made for. Used together, AI and human expertise are the tactics behind a strategy that can compete in many markets at once, each doing what the other cannot.
We should expect the net result to be the successful integration of AI, with similar outcomes to the ones we had before, but cheaper to execute.
Content ready for any audience is required to compete
Two things have changed in recent years: localisation and accessibility solutions have become affordable, and audiences increasingly expect them.
Dubbing used to be cost-prohibitive, which put it out of reach for most catalogues. AI-enabled solutions have changed that, and dubbing now offers everyday viewers a new way to experience content from other markets. A dub also produces a translated script, which makes subtitles nearly free to provide. Far more content can now be localised and made accessible than at any point before.
Audience expectations have risen as well. Viewers are watching with captions and subtitles more than ever, accessibility regulations are increasing, and audiences are more open to content from other cultures than previously.
With the cost falling and audiences expecting more, making content ready for any audience is a requirement, and a platform without it is not in the fight.
The next battle will be fought in the living room
Content that is captioned, localised, and audio described will become table stakes. It gets a platform into a market. It will not keep the viewers there.
The competition from then on is over who wins viewers’ attention in the living room, and it comes down to discoverability and user experience. Platforms will lose viewers if their experience makes it hard to find something to watch, or lacks the features to engage with the content once it is found.
Consider a viewer searching for a show by its title in their own language. One platform has it, but only in the original language, so the search comes up empty. Another platform has localised it, so it surfaces there, and that viewer has just gone with a competitor. Moments like that may seem benign, but they can be the difference between a platform being valued by its viewers or not.
Once a platform has fought for a place in a new market, the viewer will be what is left to win.
