Magellan Fulfills Its Translation Mission

MagellanTV, a documentary streaming service provider based in Washington, has a growing collection of more than 3,0000 documentaries and related features. But the potential audience for that content was limited by language, says Andrew Federowicz, its director of AI. Content produced in one language was extremely costly—$20 a minute—to translate into a second language. At that cost, only the most popular content could be translated profitably.

“For a small company like us, that cost is prohibitively expensive,” Federowicz explains. “We are a media company that distributes more than 5,000 hours of content. A lot of that is in English, but there are only so many English speakers in the world. From a business standpoint, we want to get our content in front of as many people as possible. So we were looking for a way [to economically] get our content in front of other people.”

Beyond the business motivation, Federowicz says he wanted to expose the rich content to others to elevate knowledge: “A lot of the motivating factor for me was just sharing knowledge and content with the world. I am a big fan of constant learning, and a real easy way to do that is to have content available in your language, whether it be documentary series, docudramas, or documentaries,” he says. “We had content that I would have loved to share in Europe. That was a big motivating factor for me personally with starting this project.”

But a more economical translation and dubbing solution was needed before the effort could move forward.

MagellanTV found the solution when Mission Cloud Services offered a free security audit.

MagellanTV jumped at the opportunity, Federowicz says. “I’m going to use all of the free resources that I can.”

Mission Cloud Services, which was acquired by CDW in December, provides not just free security audits; it also offers cloud infrastructure support and has worked with MagellanTV and Amazon Web Services to develop an AI-based translation and dubbing solution. As an AWS partner, Mission Cloud had access to Amazon’s Transcribe, Translate and Polly, and integrated with a large language model and Amazon SageMaker for updated and translated files. AWS funded the assessment and implementation phases of the project, which became known as Magellan VoiceWorks.

Magellan partnered with Mission Cloud Services in 2023 and began the AI-based dubbing and translation of its content in April 2024.

“We are a very small company with 15 to 20 employees; we have only so much money, staff, and time to develop something like this,” Federowicz says. “You need a wealth of knowledge, especially in the AI space. If you don’t have that under your belt, you have to go somewhere else.”

The translation now is completely outsourced. Though AI is what makes economic translation of content possible, a human still reviews questionable translations, as flagged by the technology, according to Federowicz.

Since partnering with Mission Cloud Services and AWS, MagellanTV has grown from offering primarily English-based content to also offering content in German, Spanish, and French, with many other languages to be added in the year ahead. Magellan now also expects to be able to expand the number of content developers with which it works.

The Payoff

Since going live with Mission Cloud Services, MagellanTV has done the following:

• expanded its content library beyond English to include Spanish, German, and French;
• expanded the number of videos uploaded from 10 per week to uploading that much in a day; and
• dropped its content translation costs from $20 a minute to $2 or $3 a minute, depending on how granular the human review gets.