ReelWorld Productions: On the same wavelength with Dropbox for Business

ReelWorld Productions, one of the world’s leading radio production companies, started out in a one-bedroom Seattle apartment with just two team members — but it didn’t take long for the company to become a huge hit.

The team now has offices in the US and the UK, and its work airs on more than 1,600 stations across six continents.

But this expansion didn’t come without growing pains — the company’s worldwide team of producers, composers, and writers found itself in need of a way to collaborate seamlessly on a huge library of files, across multiple time zones.

ReelWorld searched for a solution that didn’t require extra hardware or on-premises infrastructure, and ultimately landed on Dropbox. Because they work with a massive amount of files — many of them quite large — the team was impressed by how Dropbox handled bandwidth for uploads and downloads. Plus, coming from a PC-dominated industry, ReelWorld appreciated how seamlessly Dropbox worked across multiple platforms and operating systems, allowing the Mac-based ReelWorld team to collaborate easily with external partners.

The more ReelWorld used Dropbox, the more it became integrated into the growing team’s workflows. Now, four years later, Dropbox for Business is an essential part of ReelWorld’s production process and daily operations.

Today, ReelWorld’s production department uses Dropbox for Business to keep its library of 16,000 audio files organized, serving as the central hub for the administrative and sales teams. The company also uses Dropbox to facilitate collaboration between the many contributors involved in projects — from composers and writers to singers and sound mixers.

“To share MP3s or WAV files before, we had to burn CDs,” recalls Support Manager Mike Meyer. “Dropbox for Business allows us to facilitate content faster. It makes a great transport tool and an archive as well.”

Dropbox for Business has also been critical in keeping the company’s different offices on the same page. Employees in the UK office and collaborators distributed across Europe rely on Dropbox to access the files they need, whenever they need them.

“Working in different time zones can be tricky,” Meyer explains. “If we need to send a file to the UK at three o’clock our time, it’s midnight there. But Dropbox for Business will sync everything right up the next morning when the person turns on his or her computer.”

ReelWorld isn’t done growing, and many of its tech needs will continue to evolve — but the company knows Dropbox for Business will be there to grow along with it.

“Dropbox for Business is like the Swiss Army Knife of cloud services,” says Meyer. “There are so many little things we can do to manipulate and use it. It’s our de facto storage solution — and that’s not going to change for a long time.”

To learn more about how media companies use Dropbox for Business, check out our new whitepaper, “Brave new world: How Dropbox for Business is equipping media companies to thrive in the Internet age.”