LONDON, UK: ZOO Digital Group plc (AIM: ZOO) introduced the expansion of its South Asia operations with the launch of ZOO India. The firm has acquired the award-winning media services and localisation companies of Vista India Digitek Private Limited and Vista Tanweer Studios Private Limited, based in Mumbai, along with a 35% funding inside the aggregation services enterprise Vista India Digital Media Inc., which is based in California, for a complete consideration of $6.0m.
Of total, $3.1m is payable in money on completion, $1m is being settled by way of the issue of 636,100 new ordinary shares of £0.01 every inside the capital of ZOO on completion and the balance of $1.9m is to be paid as deferred consideration, with $1.3m payable 12 months from completion, $0.3m payable 24 months from completion and $0.3m payable 36 months from completion.
Established in 2012, Vista is a number one force in media localisation, media services and digital distribution for Indian and foreign language content. Vista provides end-to-end services throughout eight Indian languages and English, collectively with dubbing, subtitling, artwork and metadata localisation services and a vary of different media services.
It is an Apple approved aggregator and encoding house, a Netflix Preferred Fulfilment Partner (NPFP) and a Netflix Preferred Creative Agency. In each 2019 and 2020, Vista India was awarded the accolade of NPFP of the Year for the Asia-Pacific region.
For the 12 months ended 31 March 2021, $14k loss earlier than tax was attributable to Vista. The aggregation business, which acquires the rights to Indian TV and Film assets for exploitation internationally, made a revenue of $263k for the year ended 31 December 2020.
The acquisition and launch of ZOO India illustrate ZOO’s dedication to expand its end-to-end service offering on this rising market.
With India’s OTT (Over-The-Top) income predicted to develop from $1.9bn in 2021 to round $4.5bn by 2026, and the country’s SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) subscribers anticipated to greater than double by 2026 to 224 million, India is an important strategic focus for ZOO and its clients.
Vista has been a trusted vendor partner to ZOO since 2016 and its award-winning localisation groups already work inside ZOO’s cloud-based technology ecosystem. The all-encompassing approach helps unrestricted creativity whereas enforcing excessive requirements of manufacturing quality, workflow effectivity and content material safety throughout the entire global group.
Stuart Green, Chief Executive Officer of ZOO Digital, commented: “We are delighted to welcome Vista India and its groups to ZOO Digital Group. India has a vibrant movie and TV industry, and the rapid adoption of streaming makes it a excessive growth and strategic marketplace for ZOO’s clients. Following a year of unprecedented growth for each ZOO and Vista, that’s the subsequent step to additional expand each companies’ servicing capability to meet the wants of native and worldwide content material creators in 2022 and beyond.”
Rajiv Raghunathan, Managing Director, ZOO India / Vista said: “At Vista, our mission has always been to assist content material creators attain the largest viewers possible. By becoming a member of ZOO Digital Group and deploying their world class technologies, we have much extra alternatives to do this, each for worldwide clients bringing content material to Indian streaming services, and for native content material creators to take their TV shows and movies to a global, multi-language audience.
“By having prepared entry to the technology and global expertise pool of ZOO Digital, the partnership gives Vista a tremendous benefit on this marketplace, to instantly handle large volumes of subtitling and dubbing projects, throughout a number of languages.”
Suri Gopalan, Founder of Vista, added: “The world is seeing an unprecedented consumption of content material that’s crossing borders. This partnership will present a flow of Indian content material to the remainder of the world and worldwide content material into India.”
The acquisition of Vista sees ZOO Digital Group proceed its global expansion. This follows the launch of ZOO Turkey in November 2021 after a strategic funding in Istanbul-based ARES Media, and extra recently the launch of ZOO Korea following an funding in Seoul-based media localisation specialist, WhatSub Pro. Further bulletins are anticipated in 2022 as a half of ZOO’s global growth initiative.
ZOO Digital helps main Hollywood studios and streaming services to globalise their content material and attain audiences everywhere, by offering world-leading, technology-enabled localisation and media services.
Founded in 2001, ZOO Digital operates from hubs in Los Angeles, London, Dubai, Istanbul, Seoul and Mumbai with a development and manufacturing centre in Sheffield, UK. The firm is targeting $100m gross sales inside the medium term.
www.zoodigital.com