NAB 2025: 3Play Chief Growth Officer Lily Bond talks accessibility, localisation, and service expansion
In this interview with Streaming Media contributing editor Jan Ozer, Lily Bond, Chief Growth Officer at 3Play Media, discusses how the company has evolved from one of the earliest captioning providers into a full-service accessibility and localisation partner. With 15 years in the business, 3Play now offers captioning, subtitling, audio description, and hybrid AI/human dubbing services for customers looking to comply with accessibility laws and expand into global markets.
Bond explains the growing legal requirements in the U.S. and EU, the cultural and economic drivers behind the current dubbing boom, and how 3Play helps customers balance quality and cost. She also shares insights on why captions have become a default viewing preference, how the company handles emotional nuance in dubbed content, and what makes 3Play’s service-first model and workflow integration stand out.
Below is a lightly edited version of the conversation.
Jan Ozer: I'm here with Lily Bond from 3Play Media. Thanks for joining me, Lily.
Lily Bond: Yes, thanks so much for having me.
Jan Ozer: We’re literally on Caption Row here at NAB. One of the fun things about 3Play is that you guys were captions before captions were cool. You've been in this business a long time.
Lily Bond: Yes, we've been in the business for about 15 years. We were actually one of the first to use ASR or auto captions, along with human editing, to make captioning a more cost-effective solution.
Jan Ozer: What’s the range of services your company provides?
Lily Bond: Most people know us as a captioning provider because we started there, but we've expanded. We're focused on global solutions now, subtitling, dubbing, and then multilingual captions or audio description.
Legal requirements in the U.S. and EU
Jan Ozer: Looking at the United States, what are the requirements for any of those? What am I legally required to do with my video?
Lily Bond: In the U.S., many laws require accessibility, which means captioning and audio description for video. There are emerging laws in the EU as well. The European Accessibility Act phases in this June, so anyone delivering video to the EU also needs to think about captioning and audio description in any languages you're sending to Europe.
Jan Ozer: You talk about delivering video to Europe—what does that mean? If I put a video on my website and somebody from Europe watches it, what am I legally obligated to do?
Lily Bond: It means any business that delivers products or services to Europe. So, if you have customers buying from you in Europe, even if you're U.S.-based, you do have to comply.
Why accessibility also improves engagement
Jan Ozer: So, if I'm Netflix and I have a French app, I'm delivering in France, and I meet those requirements. What about businesses? Do they usually caption because it helps make their videos more effective in those markets, or because of legal requirements?
Lily Bond: Legal requirements are always the number one reason, but they also improve engagement and viewership. A lot of times, people expect captions on video now, so it helps drive up engagement and viewership.
The dubbing boom and market growth
Jan Ozer: Dubbing seems to have hit the world by storm. Why has that become so important? What's legally required there?
Lily Bond: There’s no legal requirement for dubbing, but the reason it's become important is that so many businesses are trying to find new markets to monetise—ways to grow their business with the products they already have. If you want to grow an audience in Japan and you have English content, you can dub your content into Japanese, and you have an option to monetise in a totally new market and grow your subscriber base, your viewership, and your customer base there.
Captions, subtitles, and localisation explained
Jan Ozer: If I'm an English content owner and I'm publishing that content via an app in France, am I legally obligated to create subtitles or localise?
Lily Bond: Under the European Accessibility Act, you are legally required to caption that in French. But you may also want to be dubbing that video, because in many countries—France is one of them—the preferred experience for viewers is dubbing over something like subtitling, and you can really work towards expanding your audience that way.
Jan Ozer: What is localisation as compared to captioning?
Lily Bond: Localisation assumes that the viewer can't understand the language of your original source content, whereas captioning assumes the viewer can't hear the audio at all. So, with localisation, you're translating your video into 20, 30 languages so you can reach new audiences and really grow your business.
Jan Ozer: So, if a cat meows, it's required for captioning, but not localisation.
Lily Bond: Correct. The cat meow is required in captioning, but not localisation.
The complexity of dubbing and the hybrid approach
Jan Ozer: Dubbing seems a lot harder because captions are just text on a screen. What are the gradations of dubbing that go from boring and unacceptable to optimal?
Lily Bond: Traditionally, there are all-human dubbing solutions, which are extremely expensive. There's a human scripting process, a human voice artist, and then audio mixing.
And then there's all-AI solutions, which have a lot of quality degradation because there are so many steps in the dubbing process. While captioning is kind of a single step, dubbing is over ten steps, and at any point in that process we can use AI or have a human in the loop to correct different parts. That's what we do—we have a hybrid solution where we use AI where it's great and humans to correct the parts where AI struggles.
Service-based delivery model
Jan Ozer: Do you offer products, services, or a combination?
Lily Bond: We're service based. All of our solutions are sold as services. We basically take video in, run it through the AI, and deliver back an asset—a dubbing asset, a subtitle asset, a captioning asset—whatever you need.
Handling emotion and tone in AI dubbing
Jan Ozer: When we look at dubbing, how much of the emotion comes through? If someone is screaming in English, are they screaming in Italian? Is that AI-based or a combination?
Lily Bond: We use AI voices to voice the dub, but there are places where the AI voice struggles. Screaming is a great example. Another one is singing. AI voices don't know how to voice those effectively. That's a great place where we use humans in the loop.
We can use a technology called speech-to-speech, where a human can record what the singing or screaming should sound like, and we'll model that emotionality onto the AI voice. The output will contain the emotionality that it didn’t in the pure AI output.
Pricing tiers and customer priorities
Jan Ozer: Are there levels to your captioning and dubbing services? Like all-AI at one price, human-checked at another?
Lily Bond: Yes, we have variability within our solutions. Everything from all-AI to all-human and everything in between. There are different price points for those.
What we think is non-negotiable is quality, but what defines quality may differ for each customer. Some may care about perfect lip sync but not translation accuracy. Others may want perfect translation but don’t care about emotionality in the voice. Those are places where you can use more AI or more human. The price reflects that.
Why captions are ubiquitous now
Jan Ozer: It feels like everybody who watches any service these days has captions showing. Is that impression correct? And if so, why?
Lily Bond: It is correct. There are a lot of studies. The BBC found that 85% of viewers watch video with captions on. This really escalated during COVID. There was so much video available that captioning just became ubiquitous.
People use captions for lots of reasons—accents that are hard to understand, multitasking, and internalising content. They’re really helpful for people with learning disabilities or attention disorders. There are lots of reasons why people use captions, and people are using them a lot.
Choosing where and how to localise
Jan Ozer: If I’m a movie owner and I want to distribute in foreign countries, do I caption or dub? Is that geographically motivated?
Lily Bond: You probably want to do it all, honestly.
Jan Ozer: Are you in sales by any chance?
Lily Bond: I'm not. I'm in marketing—but it's almost the same. We actually start from a caption file for all of our solutions, so adding captions is a no-brainer, and it’s a legal requirement.
From there, you want to think about where you can monetise globally. What markets are most effective? Are you going to have an ROI on dubbing in France or Germany? Choose your dubbing languages based on your market expansion plans.
Jan Ozer: Which markets prefer dubbing over captioning and vice versa?
Lily Bond: There are definitely markets that prefer dubbing over a text-based translation like subtitles. It’s culturally based. Eastern Europe, for example, has had dubbing for a really long time. It’s part of the culture—it’s an engagement and experiential preference.
In countries that haven’t had as much dubbing, viewers may be more comfortable with subtitles. But we’re seeing dubbing become more and more of an engagement strategy, and we expect that to continue.
Why choose 3Play?
Jan Ozer: We’re sitting here on Subtitle Row. What’s the elevator pitch for 3Play? Why choose you over the competition?
Lily Bond: There are a few reasons. The first is workflow. We've been in the business of AI—connecting video to these different types of assets—for 15 years. We plug right into your production workflow. We can integrate directly whatever video platform, DAM, or MAM you're using. Our goal is to be part of your workflow so you never have to think about these services. We just deliver back the assets. And we do that at a scale that’s unusual in the industry.
We also really focus on making the human element as efficient, cost-effective, and scalable as possible. We have a global marketplace and advanced software tooling, and we're always working to reduce time on task for the humans who perfect your output. Those two things—workflow integration and scalable human-in-the-loop quality—allow us to deliver more scale, more efficiency, and more cost-effectiveness without reducing output quality.
Ballpark pricing
Jan Ozer: I know you probably won’t want to disclose pricing at that level of granularity, but if I have an hour-long video I want to subtitle into a foreign language, is that twenty cents? Is it $20? Give me a range.
Lily Bond: You're not going to be at 20 cents unless you're using pure machine translation. And you're not going to be at $20 with us, because we use a combination of AI and humans. You’d be at $20 with a more traditional solution. We're going to be somewhere in the middle, and we're constantly working to reduce that price.
Jan Ozer: Lily, thanks for taking the time.
Lily Bond: Yes, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
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