Sky acquires leading digital content producer Diagonal View
Friday 31 March 2017
Sky announces the acquisition of Diagonal View, a leading producer of social content, known for its popular online channels, including Alltime10s and The Football Daily, as well as creating innovative campaigns for some of the world’s leading brands. The acquisition will broaden Sky’s engagement with a younger, digital-first audience, while also enabling Sky Media to offer greater brand-safe digital opportunities to advertisers.
With over one billion online views in the past year alone, the acquisition of Diagonal View will accelerate Sky’s online growth towards becoming a top five social destination for sport in all its territories and globally, building on its position as the number one destination for sport in the UK.
Diagonal View has a dedicated online audience of over 15 million subscribers, ranging across content as diverse as quantum physics to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air; military history to unexplained phenomena. Its main sports channel, The Football Daily, reaches hundreds of thousands of fans on a daily basis.
Sky Sports reached one in five of the UK & Ireland’s total digital population last year, amassing over 2 billion views globally through its existing online platforms. The most popular video on Soccer AM, Sky’s dedicated soccer YouTube channel, shows New York Giants' Odell Beckham Jr revealing his ‘outrageous’ soccer skills – racking up 5.7m views in just five months.
Diagonal View’s existing leadership team, including founder Matt Heiman, will continue to lead the business within the wider Sky Group.
Barney Francis, Managing Director of Sky Sports, said:
“Last year Sky Sports reached one in five of the UK & Ireland’s total digital population and this acquisition will further our ability to reach new social audiences. The breadth and diversity of sports that Sky has rights to, combined with Diagonal View’s track record in building audiences from scratch will be a powerful partnership; benefitting customers and advertisers alike. Matt has an excellent team at Diagonal View that will complement our existing team of creatives and producers here at Sky.”
Matt Heiman, Founder of Diagonal View comments:
“The Diagonal View team and I are excited to join forces with Sky. Our social channels complement Sky’s current portfolio – the prospect of our incredibly popular Football Daily channels collaborating with Sky, whose pedigree in this space is unrivalled, is extremely exciting. Sky brings rights, expertise and scale. Diagonal View knows how to make content that digital natives enjoy watching and engaging with, so this partnership feels like a natural win-win for both us and Sky. We are looking forward to working together in developing innovative campaigns and building on the success of our popular owned channels.”
Media Enquiries
Sky
Harrison Kelly
Harrison.Kelly@sky.uk
About Sky
Sky is Europe's leading entertainment company, serving 22 million customers across five countries - UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy. The company has annual revenues of £12 billion and is Europe’s leading investor in television content with annual programming spend of over £5 billion.
From exclusive partnerships with HBO and Showtime, to Sky’s own original programming, Sky offers the best and broadest range of content along with the best viewing experience to suit each and every customer. Whether that’s through the multi-award winning next generation box, Sky Q, or Sky’s contract-free online streaming service, NOW TV, customers have access to the latest movies, drama, sports and kids entertainment wherever and whenever they like. This is all supported by Sky’s best in class customer service.
Sky’s success is not just based on what the company does but how it does it. Named as one of the Top 10 Green Companies in the World by Newsweek, one of the world’s most recognised rankings of business’s environmental performance, Sky ensures its responsible business strategy is embedded right across the group.
Sky has over 30,000 employees and is listed as one of The Times Top 50 employers for women. Sky is listed on the London Stock Exchange (SKY).
About Diagonal View
With market-leading expertise in content creation and sharing, our business is uniting global brands with an actively engaged global audience.
Since launching in 2008, Diagonal View knows great content drives conversations and communities around content on social platforms. Along the way, we’ve gained hard-won insight and valuable experience in the creation of original content for the connected generation.
As our audiences have grown and evolved, so have we - setting industry standards with content strategy, bespoke audience development and new content produced in-house by premier digital talent.
We’ve produced content that has let blue-chip brands communicate their messages directly to their target audiences, partnered with the world's biggest content owners, from the FA to the FT and collaborated with some of brightest stars online and in real life. Our content is syndicated in 10 languages.
Ultimately, we want to make great content that gets talked about and shared.
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