Viikii’s beginnings
Viikii was started in the summer of 2007 by Razmig Hovaghimian and husband-wife duo, Changseong Ho and Jiwon Moon. The idea of Viikii came about from Changseong’s and Jiwon’s personal experiences in trying to understand different cultures and languages. Jiwon and Changseong hail from South Korea and went to the US to pursue their graduate degrees in Harvard and Stanford respectively. While they were in US, Jiwon mentioned that they had to struggle a little with the English language as they didn’t have a chance to learn English when they were kids.
Jiwon studied educational technology at Harvard and she saw the impact of Internet when it comes to innovation in learning experiences and access to information. Jiwon claims that the primary intention of starting Viikii was to “reduce language barriers.” Changseong believes that the best way to learn any language is to speak to native speakers of that language — and if that’s not possible, the next best option is to watch shows or videos in that language.
What does Viikii do?
Viikii started off as a love child of YouTube and Wikipedia, with subtitle overlays on external videos. This caused a lot of issues with content rights which drove Viikii to evolved into its own video content platform. Digital assets from content creators are uploaded to Viikii’s servers and they are replacing all external content with licensed content from producers.
By getting licensed content, Viikii wants to ensure that the subtitle makers or translators are given a proper platform for their skills and that they get their due. Changseong mentioned that previously, translators had to create their own subtitles and released them on torrent sites for everyone to access. This was considered illegal in some countries and the translators lost their copyright as well. Viikii wanted to legitimize these activities and thereby struck licensing deals with content owners.
Building a user generated platform
Jiwon said that ViiKii is mainly a community effort and they started building this platform after lots of research into the world of subtitling. They discovered that there are pockets of individuals from each country translating popular shows into their native languages so ViiKii was created to provide them with an integrated and systematic platform to which they can contribute.
Viikii is a crowdsourcing platform for subtitles which works like Google Spreadsheet. It contains revision history and ability to record and edit user generated content. There is also a rating system for users and they can advance to higher levels once they accumulate certain ratings.
Content statistics
Viikii receives 3.7 million unique hits per month, out of which 10,000 users actively contribute towards translation. It stores 100,000 videos on its servers, half of which is subtitled. Viikii’s most popular show, Korean drama “Playful Kiss” has been translated into more than 40 languages comprising of almost all major languages in the world. (In the name of research, I started watching this show and now I’m not able to shake off this addiction!)
Currently, most videos on the site are predominantly Korean shows with some Japanese and Chinese content. But Changseong said that they are talking to content producers in India, The Philippines and the Middle East regarding licensing their shows. They were also quick to add that they are not trying to be an “Asian entertainment site” but more of an “entertainment channel beyond borders.”
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