ViKi, an international video site for world TV series and movies translated in 100+ languages by its community, has raised $20 million in new funding from SK Planet, BBC Worldwide, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others. This brings ViKi’s total funding to $25 million.
For background, ViKi is an open-source-like solution for video, and acquires the rights to TV shows and movies. The site then puts it on one of its channels and within the first 24 hours an organized, volunteer community subtitles the content using ViKi’s software.
The site has gained considerable traction in the past year. Currently, ViKi is seeing 8.5 million unique visitors and 36 million total visits in the past month, which is four times the traffic that ViKi has seen from last year.
To date, 150 million words have been subtitled in 160 languages by the ViKi community, and the site features 5,000-plus hours of content. And in terms of content, ViKi is working on adding more premium content, including new licensing deals with BBC Worldwide, NBCU and A&E. ViKi also just launched and international TV series on Netflix with subtitles, and is expanding content on Hulu.
The company just debuted an iPhone app (with in-stream ads), and will contain TV series, movies, and entertainment news from around the world, with subtitles created by fans. The app currently includes movies from Japan, India’s Bollywood, Egypt, Indonesian and TV series from Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, Korea and the UK (e.g. Hotel Babylon & Mistresses from the BBC).
ViKi is also partnering up with Samsung Southeast Asia to develop an Android app for the company’s tablets. The app will be launching later this year in Southeast Asia. The partnership is expected to expand to other regions early next year.
What’s interesting about ViKi is that the model allows content owners to open up to new international markets. Clearly content partners like the BBC and top-tier investors are betting that ViKi is the future channel for international distribution and translation.