Case Study: Egyptian Radio and Television Union achieves digital transformation and scalable VOD streaming with Microsoft Azure

Egyptian broadcaster uses Azure, open source to join digital world

Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU), one of the Middle East’s oldest public broadcasters, faced declining viewers, listeners, and ad revenue as audiences shifted to online and mobile media. Working with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Link Datacenter, Link Development, and Microsoft, ERTU needed a cost‑effective, fast-to-deploy platform to offer online streaming, video‑on‑demand (VOD), and a unified portal despite government procurement constraints and a tight budget.

The team built an IaaS hybrid solution on Azure using Azure CDN, Media Services, Traffic Manager, Site Recovery, and open‑source components (Red Hat, WebSphere, DB2), plus Palo Alto and Barracuda security, while Link Development delivered a custom VOD backend and Link Datacenter managed encoding and operations. The result is a single portal with stable, scalable AV streaming for thousands of concurrent users, faster deployments, a sevenfold reduction in encoding costs, lower satellite broadcasting expenses, new monetization opportunities and measurable revenue growth — with plans to containerize the platform for further agility.

Egyptian Radio and Television Union

Mohammed Salama

General Manager, Computing and Digital Media