Case Study: Channel 2 News achieves instant, elastic mobile‑app scaling for breaking news with Google Cloud Platform

Channel 2 News' Mobile App Moves to the Cloud; Ready for any Breaking News

Channel 2 News, a leading Israeli broadcaster, runs a popular mobile app that streams live and on‑demand video and pushes real‑time news alerts. Sudden breaking events caused massive, unpredictable spikes in traffic (notably in Nov 2012), which overwhelmed their servers and made content unavailable at critical moments, so they needed an infrastructure that could scale instantly and be billed only for actual usage.

Working with Yael Software, Channel 2 migrated the app backend to Google App Engine, building a sync layer to move content and rolling out an updated app to route queries to the cloud. The result is an automatically elastic platform that handled a >400% traffic surge without downtime, delivers pay‑per‑use pricing, and gives the newsroom confidence to expand features and analytics.

Channel 2 News

Itay Filiba

Digital Products Manager