Case Study: NBC News achieves rapid, scalable breaking-news push notifications with Microsoft Azure

NBC News Picks Windows Azure over Amazon to Host Push Notifications to Mobile Apps

NBC News Digital, an early mover in mobile news apps, faced intense competition and needed a fast, scalable way to deliver breaking-news alerts to millions of users across multiple platforms without building and maintaining separate systems for each. The team wanted low latency, cross-platform push notifications and a quicker time-to-market than a custom build would allow.

NBC News adopted Microsoft Azure Notification Hubs and Azure worker roles, rolling out client changes in two days. The solution delivered near-real-time toast notifications (with Live Tiles, lock screens, and voice integration planned), supported iOS/Android/Windows from a single hub, and scaled to millions of users—resulting in faster-than-expected delivery of alerts, a 4.5-star app rating, and months shaved from development time.

NBC News

Andrew Locke

Vice President Mobile and Devices