Case Study: Nine Entertainment Company achieves real-time, location-based breaking-news alerts at scale with Microsoft Azure

Delivering breaking news, localized to users

Nine Entertainment Company (NEC), owner of Australia’s 9News.com.au, needed a way to deliver breaking news to mobile users 24x7 without relying on them to visit the website. The main challenges were delivering precise, opt-in geo‑targeted alerts (latitude/longitude within a few kilometers) across iOS and Android, while handling large, bursty traffic without overwhelming backend servers or annoying users with excessive notifications.

NEC built the free 9NEWS Alerts app using Microsoft .NET, Xamarin for cross‑platform native apps, and Microsoft Azure (App Service/Mobile Apps, Media Services, service bus and auto‑scaling) to handle push notifications, queuing and disaster recovery. Since its December 2015 launch the app has exceeded 200,000 downloads with about half enabling location; Azure autoscaling lets the system ramp from tens of thousands to 200,000+ geo‑specific notifications per hour, delivering faster time‑to‑market, cost savings and a reliable, localized user experience.

Nine Entertainment Company

Henri Paget

Executive Producer