Case Study

Reaching millions of new viewers for Sky News with content they already had

Sky News is a media juggernaut, but it still had the potential to reach more people on YouTube. Working with Papercup, Sky News took big steps towards their goal of reaching millions of people each day — thanks to high quality, fast and scalable video translation.

Challenge

A saturated English-speaking market

Sky News had achieved solid reach for its UK newsrooms with video content posted throughout the day on TV, syndication, digital platforms, and social media. Now it was looking to expand its audience. While the content created was of global interest, it was limited to the English-speaking market, so the next logical step was translating existing content and into other global languages. Unsatisfied with the limitations of traditional dubbing or subtitles, Sky News wanted something more scalable, and accessible. It also wanted to maximise the potential of YouTube as a global content platform by sharing its existing content with new viewers across the world: enter Papercup.

Solution

Time-sensitive news from English to Spanish, in a matter of hours

Sky News already had an award-winning catalog of video content, but it needed a way to accurately translate that content into different languages at scale. Identifying Spanish-speaking viewers as an opportunity, Papercup’s AI-powered video translation solution took the content Sky News already had, and repurposed it for additional reach in the new target language.

Media Company
United Kingdom

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Results

26 million views and 96,000 subscribers in the first 12 months, with a long average watch time, showing the engagement of a new native audience.

How we achieved this?

1

Translating Sky's existing, award-winning video content at scale

2

Timely set-up, management, and optimization of the new channel for nativeSpanish speakers

3

Distributing content on YouTube, with localized meta-data, thumbnails, and media descriptions

Sky News

By translating award-winning journalism into Spanish we saw important videos going viral and amassing millions of views each in territories that may not have access to credible news sources.

But as a news channel, Sky News couldn’t just repurpose existing content. It needed a translation service that understood the audience behind the language.

So that Spanish-speaking followers never miss a beat, Papercup:

Delivers fast turnaround translation on time-sensitive news reports (with videos ready to be posted on YouTube in a few short hours)

Expanded the solution to cover long-form exposés and video stories — bringing Sky News’s world-renowned journalism to new parts of the world

See what Sky News says about us

“ The overall average watch time and completion on our new Spanish Sky News channel is so far above and beyond what we had expected. That’s a testament to the quality of the Papercup solution and then how it has transformed into positive user behavior that shows us how they consume content.

We now can get more bang for our buck using our existing content. And translating to Spanish is only just the first step. And it doesn’t stop with news; it can expand to sports, entertainment and educational content." 

Jonny Keogh

Audience & Partnerships Manager

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