Let’s get digital

Published in

Zumba Tech

3 min readJan 5, 2016

Physical DVDs and CDs have been the lifeblood of Zumba® throughout its history. The discs have provided a wealth of instructional video content and fresh music for our instructors for well over a decade.

However, as time has gone on, DVDs and CDs, as content delivery methods, have shown their age.

It’s extremely costly and time consuming to produce and replicate the discs. There are also major space limitations and real challenges in shipping the discs around the world.

It was clear the company and our ZIN™ (Zumba® Instructor Network) members needed an alternative method for receiving their instructional video content and music.

In late 2014, the Zumba® Tech team set out to create our own digital content delivery platform.

This was no ordinary project. All major business units were involved. A development task force was created, utilizing the talents of the majority of in-house developers and designers.

From the start, our goal was to build a platform that would improve the deliverability of the ZIN™ monthly content, and provide a better experience than the physical discs.

The monthly physical discs actually have very impressive menus and video options that are difficult to replicate on a digital platform. In addition, Zumba® designates several different roles for its instructors, and content has to be filtered based on that role.

Besides building a complete digital platform, the technology team was tasked with creating a robust companion administrative platform for uploading, scheduling, and managing the categories, videos, and music. We also integrated with a third-party for accurate reporting for usage on the platform.

Daily meetings and multiple version releases helped us stay on track, while constant user feedback and survey results helped us fine tune the product before fully launching in August, 2015.

Nearly 2,000 JIRAs later, I’m happy to report that our ZIN™ Now digital platform is a huge success, and has been adopted as the preferred content delivery method for a large percentage of our ZIN™ Members.