Case Study: Urban Brew Studios expands storage capacity and cuts costs with Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage

Urban Brew Expands Capacity to Take on New Opportunity with Wasabi, Signiant, and iconik

Urban Brew Studios, a full-service television studio in Johannesburg, South Africa, needed to expand storage to support a new 24-camera 4K production and the growing data demands of streaming-platform work. Existing on-premises storage could handle day-to-day operations, but the team wanted to avoid the high upfront CapEx and slow setup time required to scale further, especially given the high cost of storage equipment in the region.

Wasabi Technologies provided Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage as part of a hybrid workflow, alongside Signiant for accelerated file transfer and iconik for media asset management. This gave Urban Brew fast, predictable, cloud-based storage without egress or API charges, helping the studio come in around 60% below budget and avoid more than R12.3 million rand in storage spend. The new setup also simplified archive delivery and eliminated additional LTO tape costs.

Urban Brew Studios

Trevor Nkosi

Information Officer and IT Manager