Startup talk: Meet Kashyap brothers & Cinedubs app which nullifies language boundaries in movies

Every new business endevour is borne out of a problem in the society that needs to be addressed. Likewise, there is a problem of language barrier when it comes to movies. Even though, nowadays movies are dubbed in various regional languages, they may not be released in theatres nearby considering the expense that will be incurred for a separate screen. For example, consider a scenario where only the Hindi dubbed version of a South Indian movie is being shown in North India. A person belonging to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, or any other southern state, who is living in north India, wouldn't have a choice to watch the movie in his/her mother tongue. That person would either have to wait for the movie to come on the small screen or watch it in Hindi with subtitles if any.

Aditya Kashyap, the founder of Cinedubs, faced a similar situation when he went to watch 'Mission Impossible' in Paris in 2015. The shows were only available in French that too without English subtitles.

Aditya, who saw an opportunity in this field, teamed up with his brother Vineet Kashyap in 2016 to find a language-agnostic solution. Four years later, they founded Cinedubs. It again took two years for them to get audio rights to their first movie.

"After the product was ready for the launch, the most difficult part was to get movie soundtracks after convincing the film producers. It took me multiple Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai visits to arrange meetings with the producers and show them the demonstration of Cinedubs," Aditya Kashyap recounts while speaking to Republic.

"We faced multiple rejections from film producers. Even though they were releasing the movies in different languages across India, they were not ready to provide us the soundtracks so that we could pull more audience to the theatres."

R Madhavan's support

After facing rejections from several producers, Aditya Kashyap met Tamil actor and producer R Madhavan who was releasing “Rocketry – The Nambi Effect” in 2022.

"Maddy sir was convinced in the very first meeting and also shared his interest to support us in the industry and was ready to become our Brand Ambassador," Aditya told Republic.

The technology behind Cinedubs

Users can download the soundtrack of a movie on the Cinedubs app before watching it in a theatre. The soundtrack is downloaded using Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the audio is synchronized in the theatre. The Cinedubs app records five seconds of audio from the screen using the microphone to detect the film's timestamp. The app then synchronises the audio and plays the downloaded soundtrack in the original 3D spatial soundtrack through headphones.

"We do not dub movies, we get the dubbed soundtracks from the film production companies and producers. Our technology syncs the soundtrack in the theatre with the scene playing on the screen, in customer’s preferred language while main language playing in the theatre is different," Aditya explains the process in simple words.

"As we use frequency of the audio in the theatre, language is not a concern. We have the capability to support as many languages as the movie is dubbed in. For eg: If a movie is dubbed in 10 languages, we have the capability to pull all 10 language-speaking customers to a single show at a theatre," he added.

Released 15 movies, 7 in pipeline

The platform has already released fifteen movies including Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, Vikrant Rona, Sita Ramam, Karthikeya 2, Godfather, and their seven more movies that will be released between October and December this year.

Cinedubs app has been downloaded by over 32,000 users and 88,000 soundtracks have been played, Aditya said. He also added that the company is in talks with Hollywood Studios to get their movies on board.

Patent-pending technology

Cinedubs' co-founder Aditya Kashyap said that the patent for this technology has been filed and published in India, the USA, and Europe.

"We have one competition in the USA – TheatreEars, however, it supports only one language which is Spanish. That’s why it is restricted to the USA only," he added.

About the founders

‘Cinedubs’ is developed in-house by an Indian company – Dubswork Mobile Pvt. Ltd which was founded by Aditya Kashyap and Vineet Kashyap. Aditya Kashyap comes with over 27 years of leadership experience in industries like aviation, healthcare, information technology, and ITES.

Vineet Kashyap is a seasoned technocrat who led software development and product management in HCL, Newgen Software, Wirkle INC, Aricent (Altran), and Frog.