Viki CEO and co-founder Razmig Hovaghimian told me during a call Tuesday that this is part of the company’s larger strategy of content arbitrage — it cheaply licenses out-of-market content, gets help from its community when it comes to translating these shows and then monetizes that content through advertising.

Hovaghimian in particular highlighted the deal with Japan’s TV Asahi, which is going to include titles like CSI: Crime Scene Talks 2 and the Tradegy of W. It’s the first time TV Asahi has made any of its content available outside of Japan, and he told me that it took two years to make this happen.

Viki is one of a number of companies licensing this kind of content to bring it to foreign markets, with others including Dramafever, Crunchyroll and Viewster. One of the differences is that Viki is purely ad-based.

Viki is also using a very analytic approach towards content licensing, testing out formats with its community and licensing only content that’s popular with its viewers. Hovaghimian said that Viki often stumbles across unexpected niche markets this way. For example, it realized last year that Korean content is big in Latin America, with some shows getting up to 1.3 million viewers on Viki. At that point, it’s not really long tail content anymore, argued Hovaghimian: “We view it as the torso.”

Starting this week, Viki is going to get its content in front of even more eyeballs: The company is going to announce a partnership with Amazon Thursday that will add more than 1000 hours of entertainment from Japan and Korea to Amazon’s Prime Instant catalog. Viki previously struck similar syndication agreements with Hulu, Netflix and YouTube, and is also distributing its content on its own site, as well as through sites like MSN, Yahoo and China’s Renren.

The idea to bring hit TV shows from foreign markets to the U.S. is something that’s getting a lot of attention these days. Viki’s competitors Dramafever and Crunchyroll both follow a similar approach, and are both working on expanding their content offerings and international footprints. Hovaghimian had a lot of praise for both companies, but said that Viki’s model is a bit different.

Viki’s crowdsourced captioning opens up additional markets for content owners. Some shows get translated in dozens of additional languages. Image credit: Viki.

For one thing, Viki doesn’t concentrate on any particular niche. Instead, it licenses from all over the world, and listens to its community for suggestions on what they want to see next. That community of 20 million also helps Viki with its crowdsourced subtitling approach: The site offers its own online subtitles editor, which community members have used to transcribe and translate a total of more than 320 million words in 156 languages.

The other big difference between Viki and other sites in the space is that Viki doesn’t rely on any kind of subscription model. Viki syndicates its content to Amazon and other partners, but the majority of revenue comes from advertising. Hovaghimian said that he can get Hulu-like CPMs, thanks in large part to a partnership with the BBC, which took part in the company’s Series B. Folks from the BBC have been instrumental in helping Viki with its ad sales, he explained.

The interesting thing about Viki’s approach is that these high CPM rates come at a much lower cost than what Hulu has to pay for a lot of its content. Viki only licenses content outside of the market it was originally produced for. Hovaghimian called this idea “content arbitrage”: The company licenses content cheaply, opens up additional markets for content owners, and gets premium ad rates for it. “The content costs themselves are pretty much negligible,” he told me — which can make that Turkish TV show really, really profitable.