Viki today announced that it has launched a dedicated anime channel on YouTube featuring the works of Osamu Tezuka, which it calls Tezuka Anime. The channel also allows viewers to watch the animated series with subtitles generated by Viki’s large community and was made possible using YouTube’s API through YouTube’s Premium Channel program.
At launch time, the channel features more than 130 entire episodes of Osamu Tezuka’s classic anime productions including Astro Boy, Black Jack, Black Jack 21, Dear Brother, Jungle Emperor Leo, Kimba The White Lion, and more.
While Viki has so far been delivering content through its own website and mobile apps, the move to participate in YouTube’s premium channel program will surely generate a much wider audience and a far greater recognition of Viki’s brand and efforts to bring its content to a more global audience, not to mention its crowdsourced subtitling.
We fully expect Tezuka Anime to be Viki’s first step into delivering more of its library to YouTube in that Viki’s other videos will eventually make their way to YouTube through their own dedicated premium channels. Viki currently has content distribution deals with various television production companies such as America’s NBC and A&E, The UK’s BBC Worldwide, South Korea’s SBS, Japan’s Fuji TV, and others.
Its recent moves include bringing content through Microsoft’s MSN websites across Southeast Asia where Korean content is massively popular in addition to Japanese animation and drama series, and partnering with Renren to distribute its content in China.
Viki’s enormous library of content has had 12 million monthly viewers watching over a billion videos. The company’s community of fans have translated over 250 million words across 150 languages.
