Sky News Teams Up With Urban Airship for Faster Alerts Service

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM–(Marketwired – Mar 17, 2014) – Sky News has teamed up with Urban Airship to upgrade its push notifications system on both its iPhone and iPad apps, offering instantaneous distribution of breaking news.

The new service ensures notifications are delivered to millions of handsets globally within seconds of them being sent. Future plans include immediate updates on the constituency results in the 2015 General Election, allowing users to be updated on the 650 announcements as they happen.

Urban Airship already provides the score update notifications on the Sky Sports Football Score Centre app.

Andrew Hawken, Head of Digital, Sky News commented: “This development demonstrates Sky News’ commitment to its development in the digital sphere and is one of a number of offerings we’ll be making in the coming months. Sky News embraces technology that allows our customers to be in touch with the news wherever they are, and in the format they want it.”

“We help brands tell the world what they need to know, when and where they need to know it,” said Scott Kveton, CEO and co-founder, Urban Airship. “The news industry is being transformed by mobile, amplifying both the speed and context with which information can be delivered, and we’re happy to be a trusted partner for world leaders like Sky News.”

Sky News for iPhone and iPad apps have been downloaded over 6 million times in total, and combined, attract 2 million unique users per month.

Notes to editors
Urban Airship’s Mobile Relationship Management (MRM) platform was purpose-built to meet the demands of the world’s largest brands, offering deep integration with customers’ content management systems to send push messages to millions of mobile users instantly. In addition to massive scale, Urban Airship’s solutions allow messages to be precisely targeted based on app behaviours and location, impacting engagement experiences across the customer lifecycle.