Viki (website)
 |
|
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Online streaming video |
| Founded | 2007 |
| Founder |
Razmig Hovaghimian Changseong Ho Jiwon Moon |
|
Area served
|
Global |
|
Key people
|
Tammy H. Nam (CEO) |
| Products | Internet television |
| Services | Crowdsourced subtitles |
|
Number of employees
|
> 100 |
| Parent | Rakuten |
| Website | www |
Viki is a video streaming website headquartered in San Francisco. The company also has offices in Singapore, Tokyo, and Seoul.
The name Viki is a play on the words video and , drawing similarities to those companies' use of volunteers for content management. The company won the Crunchie award for best international start-up company in January 2011.
Razmig Hovaghimian, Changseong Ho and Jiwon Moon founded Viki in 2007. Funding for the company originally came from Neoteny Labs, a Singapore start-up fund headed by Joichi Ito, and from the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. The company moved to Singapore in 2008 to take advantage of generous government backing and the city-state’s role as a pan-Asian hub. In December 2010, Viki exited the beta phase of its software and made its services available to the general public. In September 2013 it was reported that the company was being acquired by the Japanese company Rakuten for $200 million.
Viki streams premium licensed content in a similar way that Hulu does in U.S. markets. The site then puts the content on one of its channels, and the content can be subtitled by community volunteers. Viki was the first, and fastest, platform for real-time subtitling and sharing of videos of all content types.. Community members can subtitle their favorite videos in their preferred languages, under a Creative Commons license using Viki's subtitling technology, enabling individuals to collaborate globally, in dozens of languages at once. The subtitling software developed for the company allows many volunteers to translate a video concurrently in up to 160 languages. Viki also syndicates its shows with fan-generated subtitles to partners such as Hulu, Netflix, and Yahoo!, and receives fees and revenue from those distributors. Of the approximately 200 language subtitles available on the site, roughly 50 of these are vulnerable or endangered languages.
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Wikipedia