Sky News Boosts Range of Mobile Applications

Sky News has announced that is has launched a mobile news app on devices running the Android™ platform. The Android app delivers breaking news by text, images and video, and features seven different categories for users to choose from: top stories, UK news, sport, politics, business, world news and showbiz news.

As well as keeping up with the latest news, users will also be able to send Sky News their own stories and pictures directly through the application. Users will also be able to get breaking news alerts as they happen, on the home page of their devices. 

The application will allow users to watch in-depth video coverage of individual stories, and in addition, users can watch the latest news headlines video, a top showbiz headlines video clip and an up-to-date weather report, delivered by one of Sky News’ team of well-known weather presenters.

David Gibbs, General Manager Mobile, BSkyB said: ‘With mobile now firmly the third screen for our customers, we recognise the Android platform as having huge potential and we are excited to be making our first service available.  Building on the success of our iPhone apps where we now have over 3.5m downloads, we are planning on releasing a number of different applications over the coming months, each of which will use the full capabilities that Android can offer’.

James Weeks, executive producer, New Media for Sky News, said: ‘Sky News’ new app for Android mobile devices demonstrates our complete commitment to delivering news to people wherever they are and however they want it. We’re thrilled that we can now offer mobile access to Sky News for this new generation of phones.

The Sky News Android App builds upon the success of the Sky News iPhone and iPod touch app, which passed a landmark 1 million downloads in January 2010, and the launch of a new web mobile service for all other devices last month. 2009 saw Sky launch the Sky Mobile TV Application, allowing users to stream live TV directly to for iPhone and iPod touch via a WiFi connection and more recently via 3G. This followed the successful launch of Sky+ Remote Record, Sky News, Sky Sports Cricket Score Centre, Sky Sports Live Football Score Centre and Sky Showbiz applications on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. 

The app is now available to download for free for Android users in Android Market.  (http://www.android.com/market/)