Energizing Localization Pipelines With Adapt at 1/4 the Cost of Aspera

Who Is Adapt?

Adapt combines a suite of AI-powered transcription, translation, and voice synthesis tools with regional experts and artists to create quality dubs and subtitles for premium content that cost less and are delivered faster than traditional localization services. Founded in 2024 by CTO Kevin Munro and CEO Justin Beaudin, Adapt combines AI tools and human expertise for higher quality localization.

“The companies I saw using AI for localization were tech companies trying to go into media. And I felt they lacked the necessary media and localization expertise,” explains Beaudin, adding that the company consists of a core team of around 30 full time resources along with several hundred freelancers around the world.

“The fact is, you still need a good linguist to drive even the best technology. You still need to understand media and care about audio quality. And it just felt like a gap.”

🏆 Adapt Highlights:

• Can cut localization delivery time by as much as 45%.
• Works with traditional media giants like Lionsgate and NBCUniversal, and more digitally focused brands such as ABC Mouse.com or Goalcast.com
• Its proprietary platform, Nuance, integrates a number of AI technologies – such as OpenAI Whisper, DeepL, and ElevenLabs – with scripting and audio mixing toolsets.
• Works with a team of regional leads (from India to the Middle East, Latin America, Korea and Indonesia) to ensure the highest quality dubs.

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The Challenge: Cost-effectively receiving files from clients and ingesting to S3

Co-founders Beaudin and Munro had a great idea to pair AI tools with local translation experts, potential customers lined up, and even a proprietary asset management platform, Nuance, on which to manage localization assets and freelance translators.

There was just one missing piece: An affordable and easy-to-integrate file transfer solution to receive and ingest localization assets from studios and other clients.

“We had started working with Lionsgate Studios, and realized we didn’t have an easy way to receive their content,” Beaudin explains.

Challenge #1: A cost-effective, scalable transfer solution

As a cloud-native startup with limited resources, Munro says it was important to find a file transfer solution without large upfront hardware costs or expensive subscription fees, and that could easily scale along with Adapt’s needs without breaking the bank. “I’ve overseen million-dollar Aspera contracts previously,” he explains. “And the goal was not having to manage a six- or seven-figure Aspera contract.”

Challenge #2: Native S3 integration for automated transfer

Adapt’s proprietary software, Nuance, is built on Amazon S3 infrastructure. Fittingly, Munro says a huge priority was finding transfer software that could integrate natively with S3 to facilitate automated file transfer workflows.

“We’re very cloud-focused, and everything is built on AWS, so something with a native integration to S3 was kind of a big thing,” he explains. “I could build my own automation workflow, but I preferred not having to build and manage something like that – I just wanted to be able to set it up quickly.”

Challenge #3: An easy, professional way to receive content from clients

As a startup working with well-established studios and similar customers, Adapt needed a simple and professional-looking way for customers to submit files for localization.

“We needed something that made it easy for customers to send us content, and that we could add our branding and colors to for a professional and polished experience,” Beaudin explains.

Munro says he also wanted to avoid the lengthy, often highly technical customer onboarding process common with legacy software such as Aspera or Signiant Media Shuttle – a process that often involves installing software and plugins, adjusting firewalls, and opening ports.

“I’d often have to coax people through (the Aspera installation process),” he adds. 

Challenge #4: A secure solution with TPN verification

The nature of Adapt’s clientele – including large studios – means security and compliance is a top priority, along with membership in the Motion Picture Association’s Trusted Partner Network (TPN) vendor roster.

“The solution has to have some certain security pieces, or it’s just going to be a non-starter,” Munro explains. “Our standard is looking for membership in the TPN vendor roster.”

The Solution: Easy-To-Use, Cost-Effective File Transfer Integrated With S3

It wasn’t long after the company landed its first client that Munro showed Beaudin the company’s first MASV Portal – and the CEO says he and his co-founder immediately saw immense value.

Now the company uses MASV to receive all localization content from clients, ranging from single-digit GB clips all the way to large 200GB ProRes files.

A solution 4X cheaper than Aspera (not counting five-figure setup and maintenance costs)

Adapt uses MASV’s pay-as-you-go pricing tier, under which the first 15 GB are free each month and the next thousand are $0.25/GB, for a savings of more than 75 percent compared to Aspera on Cloud, which charges around $1/GB.

“It’s nice to have a pay-as-you-go solution that can scale with us without any kind of commitment,” Munro explains.

As a cloud-native solution, Munro says the immediate attraction to MASV was the ability to sign up and start receiving files immediately without expensive hardware purchases or time-consuming procurement and installations. That, and its ability to scale up or down without having to overprovision hardware or extra licenses just in case.

In the past he had to spend between $6k and $12k for a server before getting started with Aspera, along with a number of hours spent on procurement and hardware installs.

“It would usually be a couple weeks to get through a procurement approval process and actually ship the hardware. And then it would typically be somewhere in the realm of a couple days to get the server up and running.”

A no-code, native integration with Amazon S3

Munro says it took him about an hour from sign up to set up his first Portal, integrate it with Adapt’s Amazon S3 bucket, and have the workflow ready for clients to submit content.

“I did that one-hour hook up just to get files to land in my bucket, and I had automation already configured, so it just sees a new file and sucks it in.”

Now, clients submit content to Adapt through a MASV Portal and the S3 integration automatically adds the files to the company’s Nuance platform. The company’s freelancers receive a notification and are able to get to work immediately.

“They get the email notifications that something landed via MASV, they see it auto ingest into our MAM system, and they can then start working on the files” without anyone needing to manually intervene.

MASV Portals for dead-simple client upload workflows

Beaudin’s reaction to seeing Adapt’s first MASV Portal was exactly what we like to hear: “I was like, ‘Well, that looks great,’” he recalls. “Really nice. Really professional. And that was my first introduction.”

• Because customers can set up an unlimited number of Portals for free, Adapt uses a Portal per customer to keep footage organized as it rolls in.
• Instead of having to guide customers or other stakeholders through a lengthy onboarding process, Murno says instructing new clients to use MASV Portals is a snap.
• On the technical side, Munro says the hours of support calls he used to have to deal with under Aspera have all but disappeared.

“I’ve never had as low a number of troubleshooting emails that I’ve had to deal with, which is nice,” he says, adding that MASV has totally replaced both Aspera and Signiant for the company. “And those are products I spent 20 years building and managing.”

One added bonus to the ease of use around MASV Portals? Munro says he doesn’t even need to be involved when clients need a new Portal spun up. “I can hand that off to someone that’s not necessarily technical, because I’ve already taken care of some of the security pieces. They just have to follow the guidelines and make a new Portal – the integration with S3 is already there, so they just click on it,” he explains. “I don’t touch it anymore. It’s nice for me, because I have other things to deal with.”

A secure solution and TPN Gold Shield member

Munro was impressed by MASV’s enterprise-grade security posture, including at-rest (TLS 1.2) and in-flight (AES-256) encryption and robust access controls.

But what really stuck out was MASV’s Gold Shield status as a member of the TPN vendor roster.

“The studios we work with have familiarity with TPN, so I always look for that,” he explains, adding that many studio security questions and concerns can be answered by viewing a TPN vendor security assessment. “If it doesn’t have that, it’s a non-starter.”

The Result: ‘MASV Just Works’ For Less Cost

Munro says one of the biggest benefits of working with MASV is its cloud-native ability to scale up or down quickly as the company goes through “bursts” of customer activity.”

“I don’t know what’s going to come down the pipe, but with Aspera I had to pay for the max percentage I wanted to be able to run. So if I wanted to have X number of customers sending at this speed, I had to pay for the max, and a lot of the times I didn’t need that,” he says.

“We’re getting bursts of content. I don’t have to provision extra servers or procure extra licenses, and I know the system’s going to be able to handle whatever we throw at it.

“MASV just works,” he says. “And it has never not worked.”

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