Blog
ViKi Raises $4.3 Million from VC All-Stars to Translate the World’s Video
25 January 11
ViKi has an interesting, open-source-like solution for video, that could have implications for other kinds of content online too. It acquires the rights to a TV show or movie, and puts it on one of its channels and within the first 24 hours an organized, volunteer community has subtitled the content into twenty languages. In another 24 hours, there’s another 20-languages of subtitles. The company has played more than 1 billion streams of video and its community has subtitled more than 100 million words into 143 languages since its 2008 inception.
Its biggest edge may be its software, which allows easy real-time collaboration between hundreds of contributors, spread all over the world. “You can do a couple of words, go get some coffee and come back and a scene is completed,” says ViKi CEO and co-founder Razmig Hovaghimian. Translators work in teams, get to see their names in translation credits, and get to work on content they feel passionately about spreading to other cultures. ViKi’s software takes advantage of all sorts of ego, game theory, nationalistic and creative levers that push thousands of hard core users to do work that usually costs thousands of dollars per thirty-minute show for free.