Photo: Viki’s homepage
An All Things D exclusive with Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani reveals the Japanese e-commerce giant is about to buy out Singapore-based TV streaming site Viki.
The deal, which sources say is valued at a cool US$200 million, will only be officially announced next week, but is more or less confirmed.
A combination of the words “video” and “wiki”, Viki was started as a joint class project between Harvard and Stanford graduate students, who saw the need for primetime TV, movies and music videos on demand, and in every language.
Viki was established about three years ago and since then has been extremely popular with fans of Korean drama especially, who saw the video sharing and subtitling platform—now branded as Viki One-Liners—as the most updated and extensive source of entertainment.
Today, Viki has offices in San Francisco, Seoul and Singapore, but recognises that its large team of entrepreneurs, technologists and pop culture fans come from around the world.
Mikitani told All Things D that Rakuten’s foundation is not only limited to e-commerce and that they have been looking into finding a global solution for video.
Rakuten, known to be one of Amazon’s greatest competitors, has already invested large sums of money into Buy.com, e-reader Kobo and social bookmarking phenomenon Pinterest.
The video below is an entertaining introduction to Viki’s functions, as well as a good glimpse of Viki’s global and diverse reach.
