When YouTube kicked off as a video-sharing site in 2005, it spawned a new era of video watching that tore down many of the geographic and commercial barriers that had existed in traditional media markets. But despite the platform's ground-breaking nature, language still remains the biggest obstacle preventing non-English-language content from reaching untapped audiences.

Along with the thousands of hours of viral amateur footage that made celebrities out of anyone with a $100 digital camera, the platform also gave Web users a glimpse into the world of content from obscure television markets that had previously remained siloed by their small broadcast reach.

From Uzbek music videos to Korean drama serials to television commercials not seen since they last aired in the 1970s, the depth of the Internet's storagecapacity means there is no content too fringe and no fanbase too small to find a place in the online video marketplace.

For all the ways the Internet has been able to increase productivity across national borders, however, content is still highly fragmented along linguistic lines. Throughout moving picture's modern history, content traffic between different language markets has been anything but multidirectional: While English-language content predominantly from the major U.S. production houses has a truly global reach through both subtitled and dubbed forms, so-called 'foreign' content subtitled or dubbed in English is still widely seen as niche-market stuff, despite the increasingly multilingual nature of a market such as the U.S.

And while YouTube caters to a large range of language markets, the appetite for local-language content has given rise to language- and country-specific video-hosting sites such as Youku in China, Rutube in Russia and the Iranian-focused Vidoosh.

Much less common, however, are direct translations between smaller and geographically distant language markets