My only concerns about the price were that the price would cause the service to not be successful. I have no problems with not paying for something that I don't feel is worth it, there is no sense of entitlement at all.

To me, personally, it's not a huge deal because even without Baduk TV I have more material than I can consume. But I do wish to see the service continue to exist, and that is why I personally expressed concern for the price.

But anyway, c'est la vie, if you will. I hope it does succeed.

That only works if you're talking about value for yourself. If you're arguing it's reasonable for others (which he was) you have to compare value/price on different price scales. That would make no sense, which is why one should add conditions when saying, in a worldwide forum, that something available worldwide is reasonably priced.

For example. It wouldn't make any sense for me to say that 1$ is a reasonable price for a liter of milk in a public, worldwide, forum that has people who live in places where it costs less than a tenth of that.

I could say It's reasonable to expect american public to be willing to pay that amount, or not. But that's not what he did. He used his own economical environment to affirm that a price is universally reasonable and that people everywhere (since there were no conditionals) would (should) be able to pay it with minimal effort.


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 think I get your point now.

But in the end it only means his statement is not true for everyone. But I think it still holds true for most members of this forum, as well as for the targetgroup of this service. The pricing is not suited for people from countries where it is not affoardable obviously - which can't be the goal since the production costs and not the profitrange are the limiting factor.

Exactly. That why I said I agreed with him, just not with the phrasing.

I guess that part of this is directed at me, and I'd like to say in response that while I applaud David for his efforts to promote and improve go in the Western world, his offer isn't attractive to me personally. I don't feel that I ought to be getting something for nothing, but as someone who belongs to the relatively small circle of targeted customers, I have to say that I'm not interested in watching something in a language I don't understand, and I'm not interested in having unlimited access to the service in English. I simple don't have the time or money to take advantage of it.

If his offer suits you and enough other people as well, that's great. I wish David success, not just for him and his business, but also for the western go community as a whole. Making BadukTV available to the go playing public is one of the more exceptional developments that I've heard about recently. 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.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

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.


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.

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

I'm not saying that I think the price is unreasonable for the service, just simply that couldn't be afford it. I go to school full time, and work one dayshift less ythen full time, and only walk away with like $800 a month. That also means I wouldn't have much time to watch I guess, but I would if I could. I plan on grabbing the 1 week trial and watching some over the weekend

This is awesome, you have my $50. Hooray!

Will there be more dubbed videos?

Translation (decent translation) is pricey, my wife does quite a bit of this and she's quite well paid for it per hour (translating official documents and such). This unfortunately means this service is out of my price range.


I think the problem here is that if this was a mass market service it could be sold very cheaply and some people are basing their expectations off of this but realistically not many people are in the pool of potential subscribers to this service so the price will naturally be very high to cover costs. I hope it succeeds, I sincerely do, but I think the price will be too steep and this won't work out well given the amount of things people into go already spend money on.

I got a week trial - the videos are well done. The more recent are even better. I will definitely get the full package.

I like the subtitled videos more than the dubbed ones, because the dubbed ones are simply voiceover with lower orginial volume. Also I can watch them with others in the room and not annoy them with korean ^^

Second demo video:

I just stumbled upon the ending of this thread, but if you are hiring a korean for the translation im not surprised its expensive. Korea has a very high GDP.

Thailand is actually not a bad idea. It has a decent Go population and they are pretty close to Korea so its likely some of them know Korean and English.
Maybe you can send an email to the Thailand Association. You can make a 2 minute clip you have already translated, and use it as a job interview.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

GoGameGuru is advertising with "Fluent translation by native Korean speakers", "Fluent English subtitles edited by native English speakers" and "All translators and editors are 5 dan or stronger". So to me it seems like they give quality a high priority, something unlikely/hard to achieve if they outsource it to another country.

Actually I loved the dubbed ones, and they gave me a frustrating taste of how awesome this actually could be. The Lee Sedol-Yun Junsang game featured what the commentators thought was a massive blunder by Lee Sedol at the end, and they really started freaking out. It was pretty dramatic and entertaining, and this was for an on-demand video! Having this happen live would be fantastic.

I saw frustrating because this seems a very far off and remote possibility.

I like dubbed videos. I just find it hard to understand/follow a not native speaker talking english with korean talk in the background.

Thanks, and sorry for the slow reply, it's been a crazy week!

In the short term, probably not because Choi Dongeun (1p) was doing the dubbing for us and you need someone who's fluent enough in English (and Go) to translate on the fly. She's still working for us, but she's probably moving overseas shortly so she'll only be doing subs for awhile.

It's actually pretty intense and tiring doing that sort of work. I remember talking to some Chinese government translators who came here with an official delegation and they said that they usually do it as a tag team, swapping every 20 mins. They said 45 mins was about the most they could do before the brain starts to melt and you start making mistakes. Translating Go is kind of similar to being a government translator in terms of the amount of very specific, technical language used.

Anyway, Dongeun lived in Canada for years and only moved back to Seoul recently, so her English is pretty good. She was going to the Baduk TV studios to make those videos because they have all the equipment she needed there.

It's likely though that she'll be leaving Korea again soon to teach Go overseas (I won't say more because I don't want to spoil the surprise for the lucky country and I don't know whether it's final or not yet).

In the longer term we want to do more dubbing, and we're thinking about it in particular for dubbing live games, which we could also record and save in the VOD library, but that's really pie in the sky stuff at the moment.


I'll look into that, thanks. I think people tend to underestimate how difficult it is to find people with the right skills to do this in general (I did too at first). Basically you need people who are near fluent in three languages; Korean, English and Go. So far if someone is weak at any of those three, the translation suffers a lot.

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

I would like to encourage more subbing over dubbing. After watching a little of both, the dubbing is a bit harder to follow.

hmm.. if the videos are to be dubbed, wouldn't it be better to mute the original audio and leave the dub voice? it would make the overall product more refined and viewers will not be wondering if there are anything being left out. 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.

One more thing is that perhaps the video list could be designed better. For now, the layout rather messy and confusing for me. the translated games seems to be the older games. the latest one is this "Baduk TV English: Kong Jie vs Choi Cheolhan – Searching for Exquisite Games: Episode 36" where the game is played on Jan 20 2011.

does this mean that you are only translating the older games and not the newer/live games?

What i mean by a better design of the baduk english page is, maybe you could have a different lists of videos. for example, all the "searching for exquisite games" eps would be in one list.

another thing would be, maybe you could add a little description on each tourney/series. for example, for the searching for exquisite games, you could have a short description at the top of the list depicting what the series is about. that way, viewers will know what to expect for each series and not end up wonder if baduk english simply just subbing old games from baduk tv.

I hope you understand i'm not being picky, but i'm just trying to make baduk english a better experience for everyone and hopefully more people will sign up for your service which i am very grateful for. watching out the variations in korean doesn't make enough sense to me. like watching anime in japanese without any subs or dubs.

If you mute the original sound when doing a dub over, it sounds weird, and looks totaly out of sync

that's true. i noticed that i have totally skipped the video introduction at the video page. lol. every link has a short intro beside it. i guess i was just looking at the date. Searching for the exquisite game is a series recapping on past games.