Approaching 10M Unique Visitors, International Video Site ViKi Signs Deals With BBC, Netflix

ViKi, an international video site for world TV series and movies translated in 100+ languages by its community, is announcing some major syndication deals and traffic numbers.

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 tota 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 a new licensing deal with BBC Worldwide. ViKi also just launched and international TV series on Netflix  with subtitles, and is expanding content on Hulu.

What’s interesting about ViKi is that the model allows content owners to open up to new international markets. Investors have bet on ViKi’s model too—the company recently raised $4.3 million in funding from some pretty impressive investors including Saar Gur of Charles River Ventures, Reid Hoffman of Greylock, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Joi Ito of Singapore’s Neoteny Labs, Rajesh Sawhney, President of Reliance Entertainment in India and Alex Zubillaga, former global head of digital entertainment for Warner Music.

The next stop for ViKi is mobile, and the company is planning to expand to the mobile platform soon.