Alguien wrote:I do however think it could be done for a tiny fraction of it's price.
Alguien wrote:As a second example of what I'm trying to explain, the sentence: "It would cost you hundreds of dollars to get just one video translated if you did it yourself." would be totally wrong for a reader in Ecuador, or in Thailand where it would most certainly not cost hundreds of dollars to translate one video.
I may have misunderstood what you're trying to say, but if you have some great idea for how a reasonably good quality translation can be achieved at a low price I'd love to hear about it. Presumably the examples of Ecuador and Thailand are flippant and only used to illustrate a point? Are there people in those countries with the necessary language and Go skills?
Actually, when we first conceived of doing this about a year ago, I'd expected that we could do translations at a much lower price, but after many months of trying different approaches and a few complete failures (the translation was so bad that it was useless), we settled on our current approach. One thing that really surprised me is that wages in Korea are very high - at least for people who are educated enough to have the requisite language skills. They're almost as high as wages in the major English speaking countries. The choice then became one of pressing on or abandoning the concept altogether.
Then there are ideas like fansubbing, which again would be possible if you could find people with the necessary skills. We could try to support something like that if there was still a way to pay for licensing the content, infrastructure and so on. First we need to find the people though. I'm well aware that we could cut costs and produce the subtitles for less. I also know that every attempt to do that so far has produced an inferior product. Anyway, if you have a serious idea, then please explain how it works more clearly and we'll be happy test it out.
daal wrote:My concern is that if there are not enough people like you, who want BadukTV at these conditions, then it might be a long time until someone else drums up the courage to attempt such an ambitious enterprise. Nobody asked me, but I don't see what's wrong in saying that I'd be more interested in a related product, such as a dvd with several episodes.
I understand your concerns Daniel. This isn't something we decided to do on a whim. Your point about the size of the market is justified and cuts both ways on pricing. This isn't football and we can't reach the efficiencies of scale of something like ESPN. Trying to do so would involve bleeding money for a very long time and may well fail too. If we can break even and reach a point where this service is stable it gives us much more freedom to develop the kinds of options you're asking for. I don't mind people saying that this isn't for them. I knew before we started it that it would be a niche within a niche.
The people who are interested in this will know it pretty much straight away, if you're not one of them then there's no point me trying to change your mind. We'll see what happens.
However, i do feel that subs are better as it's really hard to concentrate on someone who is speaking english in a somewhat "not so smooth" manner. It wasn't as fluent as what i was made to perceive. i ended up spending more brain power trying to make out what the dub is trying to say and less on the variations on the goban. one would expect better dubbing because you only dub one or two selected videos. she sounded like she is dubbing the video on the fly, trying to finish the dub at one go. if the quality of your videos are better, i'm sure more people will not mind paying the $50.