Transcript for dotSUB Award at Ars Electronica - Austria - Sept 07

So, Michael, congratulations on winning the 2nd prize here >>yeah, 2nd prize >>in the community

>> in the digital community category.

>>Could you tell me what dotSUB is and what it is that you do?

>>dotSUB is a browser-based tool that enables film or video to be captioned and subtitled,

without any downloaded client, by people that have no training whatsoever,

from a browser, as long as we have the permission of the rights holder/film maker, into any language,

and then those videos are able to be viewed on the web or embedded in any website

in as many languages as the people have translated it.

Sort of a Wikipedia for video, if you want to say that.

>>So as an example, when I finished this video and edited it,

I could upload it to dotSUB, and then what would happen?

>>Well, then, either you or someone else, if it's in English,

we could create an original language version in English,

and then it's available for anyone else to come in and translate into other languages.

We did a proof of concept film about Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, for Ashoka,

and we had that in 76 languages. It was a 47-minute film.

>>Why would people want to log on to dotSUB and translate other people's films? For free, I presume.

>>Totally for free.

The same reason why people spend hours writing code for Linux or Apache servers or making entries into Wikipedia,

is that everyone in the world is really expert and knowledgeable about something

and people have this innate desire to make a difference and to help somehow.

And unfortunately, most people don't have the luxury or time to be involved with helping.

And the internet has enabled people, in very small chunks of time, to be able to contribute something,

whether it is 5 minutes a week or 10 minutes a week or an hour a week.

So with dotSUB, if a video has a 100 lines of text, for example, and someone has 10 minutes,

they could do 12 lines, and get bored or tired, sign off,

and those 12 lines are done and the video would show 12% complete.

Someone else could then come on and pick up at line 13 or correct them.

So, people in very, very small bits of time can make a contribution about a subject that they think is important

for other people in other cultures to understand.

>>So give me a scenario of how this would work in a broader perspective.

What is the future perspectives of a service like dotSUB for video?

>>Let me give you the example that has gotten me the most excited.

About 12 weeks ago, someone in the United States uploaded a video to our site called "RSS in Plain English."

In technology, really simple syndication is a very easy concept to understand.

This video, in 12 weeks, has been subtitled by volunteers whom we don't know,

into 26 languages, been viewed 36,000 times,

but more importantly, it has been embedded on over 1,000 websites,

of which 850 of them are in foreign languages.

So, people in Norway found this video in Norwegian and they wanted to tell their friends about it.

People who speak Swahili wanted to tell their friends about it.

So this is unleashing a power and a passion in people in all cultures to communicate in their own culture,

and a lot of the better video content and stories are not generally made in the lesser known cultures.

So this allows people to communicate across cultures in a way that was never possible before.

>>What do you think it will do for videography?

>>I think it expands videography tremendously,

and I think what we would like to do is we would like to see it begin at the creative effort,

because right now when a film maker starts conceiving up a film, part of their thought process in creating,

is what their ultimate market is going to be.

So if you are making a film that you know is going to be released in Denmark,

you are probably gearing the creativity to the Danish market,

or if it's a French film maker, to the French market.

If you knew upfront that 40 different languages were going to see your video or film immediately,

you might change the subject or how you shot your film.

So it really would give the creator or the videographer an ability to talk to a global audience from day one

as opposing to have to talk to the audience in the native language

and then hope that distribution and money will enable it to go to other languages.

>>Speaking of money, you say that this is a completely non-commercial service?

>>I never said that.

>>Oh, you didn't, okay.

>>dotSub is a for-profit company, but probably 90% to 95% of our use is for free, at no cost

for those people that have content that has no commercial aspirations or use.

>>So, let's say that I have a commercial video that I want to use dotSUB for, how would that work?

>>For example, we're doing a lot of corporate videos where people have internal corporate communication,

training videos, marketing messages, advertising messages, that they want to get in multiple languages.

So we are working with networks of professional translators around the world and hiring these professional translators,

so instead of the video being in an open environment like a wiki, those videos are in a closed environment

only available and viewable by the translators.

So, if Pepsi wants to have their video in 8 languages, they pick the languages and we retain professional translators.

We are generating an ever increasing amount of revenue doing work-for-hire with professional translations,

but our translations are costing about an order of magnitude less than traditional subtitling.

>>What about the viewing situation?

You have an embedded player on a blog and you see subtitles below.

Is it possible, in the future, to use this for, let's say, for example high definition online television viewing?

>>I'm glad you asked that.

We have in limited use on our site now, with limited videos in a few languages,

but soon will be released, the ability to take all of the Flash videos,

and we receive videos in any of the four basic video components,

transcode them to Flash, and they are rendered in Flash,

but we now have an ability to convert them back to MPEG 4s with different bitrates and different resolutions

for RSS output, both to iPods and other video-enabled mobile devices,

and now just recently to Apple TV.

So we're rendering very high-resolution MPEG 4 files that will be RSS'd to anyone,

so if you're a Russian speaker, for example, and you want to subscribe to Russian video,

you can watch all of those videos on your iPod or other mobile devices

without ever going to the computer and going to a website,

because you can view them at an RSS destination site.

about how amateur production is destroying hierachies of knowledge, etc.

Is this a threat to professional texting and the accuracy in the professional environment of subtitling?

I mean, I'm thinking about quality issues; whether these videos will actually be up to accurate and of high quality?

>>Well, I don't think that the issue is whether it's better than professionally paid for subtitiling.

You could argue, and there is a lot of discussion, is Wikipedia better than Encyclopedia Britannica?

The issue is probably, certainly very much in excess of, 98% of the videos that we do would never, ever have been translated.

And we are intentionally staying away from Hollywood and network television that has large budgets

because we don't want to be competing in that market.

We think that there is 99+% of all of the videos and film in the world

are never available in other languages

because those people will never, ever have the money to have them translated into other languages.

So our service is much better than nothing and is as good as the integrity and desire of the translators,

and as our service grows and becomes more ubiquitous,

we expect we will be creating a very large, vibrant community around the world of people,

that will be then correcting it.

We hope to be working with language schools and universities that will be using this as training

so people can take a look at it and correct it

because they want a Romanian video to accurately reflect the Romanian language.

So, the issue about the accuracy is not an issue of comparing to what's done,

it's basically taking all of the things that have never been done

and creating a new opportunity across cultures.