ITFC today announced the appointment of Stewart Dickison as Media Access Operations Manager.
Chris Higgs, ITFC's Managing Director said "Stewart brings a wealth of experience from previous roles with Visiontext, VIDSubtitling and Technicolor (TCS) with an international career in subtitling and localization spanning more than ten years. I know everyone at ITFC looks forward very much to working with him."
After an early career start in journalism with the Press Association, Stewart moved into the subtitling field at Visiontext, in the days before the launch of the DVD format where he stayed for three years up to and beyond the Ascent Media acquisition. He later went on to co-launch Digital Film Services (DFS) and was an early pioneer of the shift towards the integration of DVD subtitling with DVD compression and authoring services, which has since become the industry standard.
DFS was acquired by VIDFilm becoming VIDSubtitling, before finally being acquired by Technicolor. Stewart stayed on post-acquisition and was appointed to manage Technicolor's worldwide subtitling operations, spending three years working out of their Burbank headquarters. During this time, he steered their subtitling operation towards providing the first fully integrated multilingual 'downstream' workflows for subtitling & localisation services on major releases which took theatrical translations from 35mm to Digital Cinema to DVD to Blu Ray to VOD/TV, working entirely with Technicolor divisions. He also led the establishment of the industry's first 'online approval' system, whereby clients' worldwide territory licensees and subsidiaries approved subtitle translations from a secure proprietary streaming service within hours, instead of days as was the case when shipping VHS screeners by courier years previously, thereby greatly shortening subtitling timelines.
Commenting on his appointment, Stewart said "I am delighted to be joining ITFC's Access Services division at this exciting time for the company. ITFC has maintained a strong, independent and prosperous market position during a decade of frantic corporate acquisition-led integration and private equity financing across much of the post-production sector. ITFC's continued dominance in providing high quality access services to the broadcast, theatrical, VOD and broadband sectors is testament to the efficacy of a business model offering flexible, responsive and convergent workflows to meet clients' ever-expanding service requirements. Backed by pioneering parent company Elektrofilm, and a highly successful 30 year history of providing quality and excellence, I welcome the opportunity of working with such a progressive company as ITFC and to assisting in the next stage of its development." |
