Transcript for DLD 2008: Michael Smolens

Uploading the 21st Century

The world becomes global, and the Internet is global.

And next to me, there is a man -- he is making all languages global to understand for everybody.

His name is Michael Smolens, and he works for dotSUB -- Any Film, Any Language

Hello. >> Hi. How are you Christine?

>> I am fine. Thank you. And how are you?

>> Very good. Thank you.

>> What about dotSUB? What's your vision? What's your idea?

>> Well, the vision is that the world is getting to be very, very large,

and many people in other cultures have a lot to say about the direction politically and economically in the world,

and unfortunately, there is no easy and inexpensive way to enable people in one culture

to understand the needs and feelings and desires or the media of other cultures.

Because language has always been a tremendous barrier to cross-cultural communication and understanding.

So we really feel that if we could do something to remove language as a barrier,

perhaps people wouldn't be strapping bombs around their chests or flying airplanes into big buildings.

And once people understood other cultures, we think that the world would be a much friendlier place.

And different cultures would have more respect for what other people think.

And one of the easiest ways to understand what other people think is to read their books,

watch their films, watch their television programming.

But traditional tools for either subtitling or dubbing are very expensive, very time-consuming, and extremely cumbersome.

So it turns out that only the very best-sellers are using the vernacular -- those -- that content that's at the top of the long tail,

is ever only available in a few languages of those few markets that are the biggest markets in the world.

But all of the other content is not available to most of the people in the world who speak a lot of the other languages

and using traditional tools, there is no way for the existing supply chain to make that happen

because those markets don't have a large enough potential commercial base

to enable someone to make the investment to re-purpose content in other languages.

So, therefore, all of these incredibly powerful stories, films, television programming

that people spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars --

after a few years, sits in a drawer, only being seen by a few people.

And all of this content could be relatively easily and inexpensively made available to people who speak other languages,

but it requires a multiple paradigm shift in thinking.

And I hate to use that word -- copyright -- and the rights issue and the distribution

are all very big issues that have established themselves over generations

that need to be dealt with in addition to the difficulty of language.

So our vision is to really eliminate language as a barrier to communication using video as the communication tool.

>> So your tool is not only technical game or not official tool.

It's a real helper to get more peace in the world, to get more understanding.

>> Yeah, it's something to -- when people watch something passively, they don't get engaged.

And new media, or Web 2.0, is all about interactive tools.

And so, if someone -- if you're a Romanian, and you're very proud of a Romanian documentary film

that tells about some part of Romanian culture, and you happen to speak Greek...

you might want to spend some time making that film available in Greek so people in the Greek culture could see it.

Or if you speak Romanian and Russian, you might want to do that,

very much like people spend time on Wikipedia to enter articles or computer programmers would do Linux.

Or they would do Apache. Or people might make entries on other open-source tools

because we sort of feel that all human beings have a real innate desire to make a difference.

And most people don't have the luxury of knowing what they can do to make a difference.

And everyone in the world has one or two things that they're very passionate about,

whether it be ballet, whether it be basket weaving, whether it be growing a specific kind of flower,

and they generally wouldn't have other people to share that vision with.

So we hope that as the Internet gets more pervasive, more and more people will have the opportunity

to share stories across cultures if they happen to be bilingual.

>> This sounds -- it's a social project, so it -- no?

>> No. No. It is not a not-for-profit project. It is a for-profit business.

>> This was my question because it sounds very social, and so I wanted to ask: Do you have a sponsor or ...?

>> Well, the -- I have been funding the business privately myself up until now.

And the way that we're generating revenue, and we're generating an increasing amount of revenue,

is that there are large corporate users who have video advertising messages, video training,

video public relations, marketing -- all sorts of internal or external tools -- distance learning,

medical, educational -- more and more people are using video as a tool to communicate.

And part of their model is to sell their video or their services to other cultures.

But because videos are produced in English at a very large expense,

they generally have to expect their students or the other users to watch their videos in English, which limits their market.

But they also don't trust the open community to accurately translate their videos,

so our tool, in exactly the same way, can be used with an ever-increasing network

of professional translators and translation agencies who then use our tool

and do a professional job of translating video content for commercial users

at about an order of magnitude less than traditional tools and probably 90% quicker.

Something that normally might take 10 days to 2 weeks, we can probably do in 1 or 2 days.

So there's an ever larger and growing commercial use for the tool,

but probably about 90% of the use of our tool will always be for people that have no money or have no commercial aspiration

so our tool will be free to use or free to embed.

>> What do -- how do you see the future of uploading platforms, or what do you wish for the future of the video platform?

>> What we wish is the fact -- as in the late 90s when digital photography first came out,

all of the existing film companies -- Kodak and Fuji primarily -- were very, very slow to react to this challenge.

And it was just last year, there was a period of -- in the early -- after the turn of the century,

where the number of photographs that were printed went down dramatically,

but last year, as more and more people are taking a large number of digital photographs,

they're printing more and more, so the printing is now back up to where it was.

And the same thing is now happening with video.

The ability to have very low-cost, high-quality video cameras,

the ability to have online open source or very low-cost tools, like Final Cut Pro or some open-course free tools,

so you can shoot a video, you can upload it to -- you can edit it, you can store it,

and you can deliver it at an ever declining cost, so more and more organizations and people

are beginning to use video as a tool for communication.

And as mobile platforms, as being talked about here at DLD, are becoming more pervasive,

there's going to be advertising messages. There's going to be communication.

There's going to be short-form entertainment called video snacks of 1 to 2 minutes.

A lot of content -- originally, the content producers wanted to take long form content -- either 60- or 80-minute movies --

or 30-minute television shows and think that they could successfully deliver those on mobile devices or computer screens.

And they are very quickly learning that new forms of content are being written, designed, shot, and created

for delivery to ever smaller screens.

So the mobile device is the fourth screen. The movie screen is the big screen.

The television was the second. The computer screen is the third, and now the mobile device is fourth.

And the length of time the consumers have the patience to watch content drops as the size of the screen drops.

More and more people will be using video to communicate important messages,

and we want to be an integral part in making people aware that language is not a barrier.

If I can add one other thing, I've just been here at DLD for -- this is my second day,

and I find it very interesting that conferences in the United States -- language is not yet an issue,

because the American market is such a large market that's English-centric,

and the people in the United States are not generally thinking about re-purposing their content in other languages.

But here in Europe, where there's 27 countries in the EU and the European Union has the issue every day of different languages,

language is much more on the radar screen, so it's a pleasure to be around people

who share our vision to understand the importance of language.

>> Thank you!

>> Thank you very much.