Unleashing Disruption

Based in the US, UK, India, Korea, Denmark, Turkey, and Dubai, ZOO Digital provides subtitling, captioning, dubbing, and full end to end digital distribution services to the world’s leading content creators.
The company’s clients include all the major Hollywood studios, OTT platforms, and the ad industry. Using their own technology in conjunction with cloud computing, ZOO delivers smart, simple, and cost-effective global services.

ZOO offers voice recording services globally and remotely, with no need for a physical presence, thanks to the help of technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Having already worked with AWS on storage and scalability improvements, ZOO work with AWS teams to maintain their disruptive presence and ensure that customer needs are met—wherever they are in the world.

Storage issues were adding up

ZOO had developed a bespoke web system for one of its largest clients, hosted in a data center in California. The setup comprised clusters of VMs, storage, firewalls, and switches. When the client wanted to move some of its workflow into the system, a significant part of the development process was assessing in detail the client’s storage requirements. They purchased 4x the capacity the client agreed upon, and a backup solution that could store 10x. The project was deployed with such success that the customer decided to incorporate additional workflows into their usage. But, after six months, the predicted storage was full and another reassessment was required.

This pattern would repeat several times. ZOO had to address its continual storage upgrade situation, which had become a guessing game—especially as clients often didn’t know how much storage they would need. To make changes, ZOO’s system would have to go down. Plus, with the data center located in California, supporting disaster recovery and managing business critical assets had also become problematic.

Going global with the local touch

Today ZOO hosts a number of managed services focused on the needs of the entertainment industry—all implemented directly on AWS throughout the development lifecycle. Today, ZOO are taking advantage of an increasing number of AWS services: VPC, EC2, RDS, ElasticCache, ElasticSearch, CloudFormation, Cloudfront, API Gateway, Lambda, ECR, ECS, Fargate, and Global Accelerator. For ZOO, the AWS culture of customer-centricity continues to bring advantages. The company’s main products are ZOOsubs, ZOOdubs, ZOOscripts, and ZOOstudio. All three compete largely in a space of existing providers who have physical locations where translators and actors work. ZOO’s solution enables translators, voice actors, and directors to be geographically dispersed. Native speakers can be easily provided for local translations. As ZOO have scaled their number of international content providers, they have gained global reach by utilizing AWS Global Accelerator, Cloudfront, as well as using accelerated upload to S3. ZOO can run its systems from a single region in the US while servicing users globally.

Leaving locations behind

For ZOO, how much business a company sends them, and scaling hardware accordingly, is no longer an issue. The company is free to scale globally, bypassing the traditional location-based business model, and disrupting the market as a result.