ZOO Digital launches ZOO India with the acquisition of Vista India Mumbai

March 21, 2022

ZOO Digital is pleased to announce the expansion of its South Asia operations with the acquisition of Vista India Mumbai. The deal sees ZOO acquire Vista India’s award-winning media services and localization business including its Mumbai-based dubbing operations, together with an investment in the aggregation services arm of the business.

The acquisition and launch of ZOO India illustrates ZOO’s commitment to expand its end-to-end service offering in this growing market. With India’s OTT revenue predicted to grow from $1.9bn in 2021 to around $4.5bn by 2026, and SVOD subscribers expected to more than double by 2026 to 224 million, India is an important strategic focus for ZOO.

Established in 2012, Vista India Mumbai, is a leading force in media localization, post-production and digital distribution services for Indian and foreign-language content. The company provides end-to-end services across eight Indian languages and English, including dubbing, subtitling, artwork and metadata localization services and a range of media services. It is an Apple-approved aggregator and encoding house, a Netflix Preferred Fulfillment Partner (NPFP) and a Netflix Preferred Creative Agency. In both 2019 and 2020, Vista India was awarded the accolade of NPFP of the Year for the Asia-Pacific region.

Vista is experienced with working in the cloud-based technology that ZOO operates throughout its ecosystem with its global partners and freelancers. The all-encompassing approach supports unrestricted creativity while enforcing high standards of production quality, workflow efficiency and content security across the entire global group.

ZOO CEO, Stuart Green, commented: “We’re delighted to welcome Vista India and its teams to ZOO Digital Group. Following a year of unprecedented growth for both ZOO and Vista, this is the next step to further expand both companies’ servicing capacity to meet the needs of local and international content creators in 2022 and beyond.

“Having been a trusted vendor partner to ZOO since 2016, Vista’s transition will be seamless for both employees and clients” added Syed Ahmed, Head of International Development at ZOO. “Vista’s localization teams already work within the ZOO technology ecosystem, using platforms such as ZOOsubs and ZOOdubs, therefore following the acquisition the high level of service enjoyed by current clients will continue.”

Rajiv Raghunathan, Managing Director, ZOO India / Vista India said: “At Vista, our mission has always been to help content creators reach the largest audience possible. By joining ZOO Digital Group and deploying their world-class technologies, we have even more opportunities to do this, both for international clients bringing content to Indian streaming services, and for local content creators to take their TV shows and movies to a global, multi-language audience.

“By having access to the technology and global talent pool of ZOO Digital, the partnership gives Vista India a tremendous advantage in this marketplace, to immediately manage large volumes of subtitling and dubbing projects, across multiple languages.”

Suri Gopalan, Founder of Vista India added: “The world is seeing an unprecedented consumption of content that is crossing borders. This partnership will provide a flow of Indian content to the rest of the world and International content into India.”

The acquisition of Vista India sees ZOO Digital Group continue its global expansion. This follows the announcement in late 2021 regarding the launch of ZOO Turkey after a strategic investment in Istanbul-based ARES Media, and more recently the launch of ZOO Korea following an investment in Seoul-based media localization specialists, WhatSub Pro. More announcements are expected as part of ZOO’s global growth initiative in 2022.