A new online video portal is looking at legitimized fansubbing as a way to reach fans that are being overlooked.
As anime distributors continue to weather out a tough market, they've started exploring new ways to get their product to a digital-savvy audience, from YouTube streams to digital downloads from the iTunes store. But one of the reasons why digital piracy continues to thrive is to serve the needs of the niche: people who want anime titles that may never get licensed for distribution outside of Japan.
Piracy has served some fans very well indeed. They copy niche anime titles, add their own English subtitles, and pass the results around to other fans. Fansubbing, as this process is called by the fans themselves, is their own end run around licensing hassles and distribution issues. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any less contentious or illegal, even as its effects on sales continues to be hotly debated.
To that end, a video portal named ViKi is taking a stab at closing the gap between what fans want (but isn't always commercially viable to provide) and what anime licensors can offer. The idea is pretty clever: the company picks up the rights to legitimately stream a given title online, but without English subtitles. Fans then log in and add subs interactively, and the site tracks the completeness of each episode and series's subtitling.
The idea is intriguing, and so far a few appetizing titles have been lined up: Ozuma, Black Jack, Astro Boy and a couple of others. The bulk of ViKi's licenses are shows like Korean dramas, though; anime still represents a very small slice of the total pie. Also, it's not clear what their licensing window is -- that is, how long they will have a given show for -- and their anime acquisitions right now are already represented, with professionally-created English subs, on Crunchyroll and elsewhere.
That makes me wonder if the anime portion of ViKi is still essentially a test run, and will be expanded later on with far more niche content that fansubbers will be more enthusiastic to sink their teeth into.
What do you think of ViKi? Have you tried the service yourself yet, or donated subtitles?
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