Behind the scenes at the Sheffield business which dubs and subtitles some of the world's biggest TV shows
Sheffield’s Zoo Digital has evolved with the fast-changing entertainment industry to help millions enjoy the world’s most popular shows. CEO Stuart Green speaks to Chris Burn.
Zoo Digital is now a global operation subtitling and dubbing many of the world’s most popular films and TV shows but the Yorkshire firm’s own Hollywood story started with a calculated gamble on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Explaining the company’s journey to our sister title The Yorkshire Post inside the firm’s Sheffield headquarters, long-standing CEO Stuart Green says Zoo started making online quiz games as a software company in the early 2000s and then developed technology to allow interactive gaming on DVDs – something that at the time was thought to be unachievable.
They pitched it to Celador, the company which owned the rights to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which at the time was one of the country’s most-watched programmes.
Green recalls: "They said, ‘We'll stop you there and save you a lot of time and money. We've done a feasibility study. We've got a world expert on DVD to advise us on this. He says it's impossible’. We said, 'Actually, we think it can be done’, and so they said, ‘Well, we're happy to take your money’.”
They struck a deal, created the game and it became a major success, selling more than one million copies. But even more significantly, at a time when extra features on DVDs were a major selling point for the discs, it also opened the door to the company to offering its technology to Hollywood studios to create bonus games on their film releases.
Zoo quickly expanded their offer, helping studios to localise programmes into different languages using their technology. But Green says once Netflix launched a streaming service in 2007, it quickly became apparent the days of DVDs were numbered. He says it led to a “really tough” 10 years for the company as DVD sales petered out while widespread adoption of streaming was held back by consumers lacking the necessary internet connections to get a smooth service.
He says demand swiftly rose from around 2017 as fast broadband became more widely available and traditional studios as well as new entrants like Amazon and Apple started their own streaming platforms and began making more shows and films to attract new subscribers.
Zoo’s revenues climbed rapidly to surpass $90m (£66m) and a profit of $8.1m in 2022/23 – but then immediately more than halved to $40.6m the following year as a combination of a writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood and streaming services reassessing their programme strategies led to a $19.1m operating loss.
Green says the tailwinds of those factors has led to a “really painful three-year period” involving job losses but he says both the wider industry and the company are now turning the corner. That increased optimism is underlined by the listed company’s recently-published results for 2025/26 which showed revenues of $42.3m but importantly a 260 per cent increase in adjusted EBITDA to $4m and a 75 per cent reduction in operating losses to $1.6m.
"We think the future looks great, actually. We believe the industry's turned a corner and we've turned a corner with it,” he says. "We believe that we will return to growth this year, and now that we have our restructured business, we'll be more profitable as well.”
The company works with around 12,000 freelancers and has around 400 permanent employees around the world, with about 70 based in Sheffield and others in locations like India, Korea and Los Angeles in a ‘follow-the-sun’ model allowing it to provides 24/7 services because of its global locations.
“Sheffield is obviously our headquarters and it continues to be a really important location. We've got very high quality jobs here that were important for us to keep. All our software product development is done from Sheffield, for example, and that innovation and the creation of that bespoke technology is at the heart of our strategic plan.”
While the exact content Zoo Digital works on is a closely-guarded secret for contractual reasons, a recent investor note lists Amazon, Disney, HBO, Warner Bros and Paramount among its customers, with Netflix, Amazon Prime and Paramount+ named among its distribution partners.
"Content might go into 80 different languages. You've got to have expertise across all of those languages and that's obviously something that is requires a team of people.
"There are lots of companies out there that offer these services. What makes us different is that, as a tech technology company at heart, we've innovated and we've created a whole suite of different cloud-based systems that enable us to do this really efficiently to a really high standard at scale at a very competitive price.
"For our customers, time to market is becoming really critical. Once they finish making a show, the sooner they can get it out there, the better. That's become so critical to them that they're actually now looking for partners who can do it more quickly. We're locked and loaded as we're already doing that."
With streamers also increasingly moving into live sports, Zoo has been recording growing revenues for its almost instaneous ‘fast track’ service. He says one recent live sporting event for a major streaming service which ran for five and a half hours involved 400 people working on Zoo’s systems to deliver it to viewers into 30 languages.
“We can automate lots of the process, but it absolutely needs to have human oversight because you can't afford to get it wrong. When you're localising speech, you have to be mindful of the listener, and if someone is saying ‘It's raining cats and dogs here’, you've got to understand that's not a literal thing and find the appropriate colloquial expression.
"One of the reasons people work for us and are very passionate about what they do is having the privilege of working on content that comes from the best producers in the world, and then see it go out on their own TV. Everyone gets a buzz out of what we do and the trust that is placed in us by the biggest names in entertainment. That is quite special.”