ZOO Digital subtitling service reaches new milestone

Cloud-based subtitling and digital distribution service provider ZOO Digital Group announced on Monday that it surpassed a new company milestone, delivering more than 200 million subtitles for “the biggest names in the global TV and movie industry”.

The AIM-traded firm said it reached 100 million subtitles three and a half years after launching its subtitling service, with the subsequent 100 million added in just six months.

“As the industry continues to evolve, so too does the demand for our solutions,” said ZOO Digital CEO Stuart Green.

“It is now easier for content owners to reach a much wider audience through digital rather than physical products and as a result, content has become commercially available in more and more geographies, driving the need for subtitling into additional languages.”

ZOO said subtitling was a “key tenet” of the group's localisation services for its clients, delivered using its innovative cloud technology.

The company said it provided foreign language subtitling, captioning and dubbing in all languages and distribution formats for clients worldwide, including the six major Hollywood studios, global broadcasters and major online retailers.

Its board explained that one subtitle is counted as a phrase of text displayed on screen, either to translate dialogue into another language or as an aid for hearing-impaired viewers, with a typical feature film requiring around 700 such subtitles for each language.

The demand for ZOO's subtitling service was said to be growing “rapidly”, which had been reportedly driven by the growth in content for sale through digital platforms now widely available from a growing number of ‘over-the-top’ providers.

ZOO said it processed more than 250,000 minutes of subtitles and captions per month, on what it called some of the world's most well-known feature films and television programmes.

“We are ideally positioned to service this heightened level of demand through our efficient and secure cloud platforms, which give us the capacity to scale our services efficiently to respond to our clients' needs of reaching audiences everywhere,” Stuart Green added.