Breaking news on an Olympic scale.
A custom content platform engineered for the moments when traffic spikes and accuracy matters. Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 ran on the same backbone, with breaking-news cycles in between.
A platform for the moments when accuracy matters most.
The Olympic Games are a singular broadcasting challenge: more than 330 events across 17 days, 11,000-plus athletes competing across 50 sporting disciplines. As Japan's most-trusted news source, NHK has to provide accurate, up-to-the-minute coverage in real time for 126 million people.
Breaking news creates its own workflow problem. Stories evolve as they unfold; edits collide; conflicting versions surface. The system underneath needs to keep the editorial signal clean while traffic peaks and dozens of editors update the same story.
CMS and website, separated by design.
We spent several weeks inside NHK's operations room before writing a line of code, mapping the workflows that broadcast journalists actually use. The investigation produced a 100-page specification document covering security, integrations, and the approvals required — including from the International Olympic Committee.
The platform that came out of it has a simplified user interface, clear version numbering, calendar publication views, colleague notes and notifications. The CMS supports granular permissions for the 200-plus expected users. Architecturally, the CMS sits completely separate from the website: static content publishes to the cloud rather than the CMS handling requests directly, which protects integrity during traffic surges.
Two Olympics on the same system.
- 2 Olympics delivered: Tokyo 2020 + Beijing 2022
- 200+ editors served, with granular permissions
- On schedule approved by all stakeholders, IOC included
- Passed security review by a world-leading accountancy firm
The architecture we built for NHK has since been integrated into all of our CMS products — the spike-tolerant separation between CMS and website, the granular permissions model, the editorial workflow for breaking news.