Interview with Viki’s Razmig Hovaghimian: The power of crowdsourced subtitling

Hovaghimian is the CEO of Viki, an entertainment startup which uses pirate-style practices for a totally legitimate outcome. Just as pirates jump on illegal video files and race to see who can subtitle them first, Viki asks its community to subtitle shows from around the world that it has legally licensed.

The result is a user base that has quadrupled in a year, to 4 million users; and the crowdsourced subtitles being increasingly used by channels and DVD distributors in fincished product. For former NBC exec Hovaghimian, this is just the beginning…