Case Study: SRF achieves fast, reliable realtime news updates at scale with Ably

SRF delivers fast and reliable realtime news updates to millions users

SRF, Switzerland’s top-rated public service broadcaster, needed a fast and reliable way to deliver live ticker news updates to millions of users without overloading its infrastructure. Its existing long-polling approach struggled during unpredictable traffic spikes, especially when stories became highly popular or went viral.

SRF implemented Ably’s realtime WebSocket-based messaging platform to push news updates to readers in less than one second. With Ably, SRF handled major surges smoothly, including 62,000 concurrent users and more than 20 million visits in a single day, while keeping servers calm and automatically absorbing traffic spikes through elastic scaling.

SRF

Urban Etter

Technical Lead