The Nine Entertainment Company developed a mobile app called 9NEWS Alerts to deliver breaking news and localized information to users based on their location. They used tools like Microsoft Azure, .NET, and Xamarin to build the app, which allows users to receive push notifications on topics they select. Over 200,000 people have downloaded the app since its 2015 launch. The auto-scaling capabilities of Azure allow the app to scale quickly from 30,000 to 200,000 notifications per hour without issues during peak periods. The tools helped accelerate development and reduced costs.

1. In today’s fragmented world of seemingly unlimited media channels, news travels fast—and gets old fast. Capturing and
keeping viewers and subscribers is no longer so much a game of news “scoops” and trusted newscasters, but of how
personalized news can be. People still want to hear about big stories, but they especially want the news that may affect
their lives most, day to day, hour by hour, and often minute by minute. That’s why the Sydney, Australia–based Nine
Entertainment Company (NEC), one of the nation’s leading media and entertainment groups, designed a mobile app that
could deliver both: 9NEWS Alerts.
“Our NEC IT developers really showed a lot of creative software engineering
in addressing competitive requirements such as geo-targeted, location-based
services, and also in solving the scalability issues. Rich features in Azure provided
the tools they needed to do that.”
Henri Paget, Executive Producer, 9News.com.au, Nine Entertainment Company
Delivering breaking news,
localized to users

2. Customer Name: Nine Entertainment Company (NEC)
Industry: Media & cable
Country or Region: Australia
Customer Website: www.nineentertainment.com.au
Employee Size: 3,800
Customer Profile
Nine Entertainment Company is a leading media and entertainment group
focused on the delivery of premium video content to all Australians. It
delivers free-to-air TV broadcasting, subscription video-on-demand, digital
channels, and online content.
Henri Paget is executive producer of
9News.com.au, which is owned by NEC
and is Australia’s premier news source. He
recalls the challenge: “We needed a way
to reach our audience with breaking news,
without them having to come to the 9News
website or our other channels, whether
online social media or over-the-air. We
needed a way to push notifications about
stories to people on their mobile devices
24x7, no matter where they might be.”
Paget and his 9News team members
sat down with their IT support team
to brainstorm ideas for a mobile news
application. They came up with the concept
of providing a free, mobile application
called 9NEWS Alerts for users of iOS and
Android devices, downloadable from the
Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
“9News Alerts is for people interested
in breaking news across a wide range
of topics, like crime, weather, traffic,
finance, and entertainment,” says Stephen
Kyefulumya, NEC IT Business Solutions
Manager. “But, unlike any other major
news apps in Australia, it can reach people
based on their location, if they choose. So
when a local news story breaks near them,
we can tell them about it using latitude
and longitude coordinates within a radius
of a few kilometers of where they are.”
Localized news alerts in the
“land of fire and floods”
Since the launch of 9NEWS Alerts in
December 2015, more than 200,000
people have downloaded the app, with
about half activating the location-based
feature of its core push-notification
capability. “Australia is known as the
land of fire and floods,” says Kyefulumya.
“So it’s no surprise that so many of our
subscribers want weather and emergency
notifications. Traffic alerts are another big
reason they turn on the location feature.”
After subscribers download and install the
9NEWS Alerts app, it works by scanning
the NEC 9News website every 60 seconds
for news in whatever topics the subscriber
has selected for alerts or all topics if none
was selected. “If they feel they’re getting
too many alerts, they can easily dial that
back by changing their choices using the
app’s settings function,” Kyefulumya says.
According to Wayne Schwebel, the 9News
software architect and development
team leader, the design goals were
straightforward. “We wanted an
easy-to-use app with location-based
features, plus a great-looking interface
that’s simple to navigate and delivers the
most information, so users can scan all
the news stories quickly and get the info
they need in a timely way,” he says. “At the
same time, we didn’t want users to find
the app intrusive or be bombarded with
spam-level notifications all day long.”
Microsoft .NET and Azure,
a powerful combination
For their development tools and platforms,
Schwebel and his team turned to the
Microsoft .NET Framework, a familiar
environment, and the Microsoft Azure
App Service, especially its Mobile Apps.
“Although it’s hard to say exactly
how much we were able to
compress our development cycles
and cut our time-to-market, clear-
ly the powerful capabilities we got
from the many tools in Microsoft
Azure and Xamarin delivered
meaningful time and cost savings.”
Stephen Kyefulumya, NEC IT
Business Solutions Manager,
Nine Entertainment Company

3. For delivering content, they chose
Microsoft Azure Media Services.
The Microsoft Azure App Service
is a fully managed platform-as-a-
service (PaaS) offering for professional
developers that brings a rich set of
coding capabilities to web, mobile, and
integration requirements. Inside that
PaaS is Mobile Apps, a highly scalable
development platform that helps them
meet their design goals for 9NEWS Alerts.
“Our familiarity with the Microsoft .NET
platform led us to evaluate the Microsoft
Azure App Service, but the really deciding
factors were the latter’s Mobile Services
toolset, such as push notifications, and
its many other powerful but easy-to-use
features like auto-scaling,” Schwebel says.
“As far as tools go, they are extremely
low-friction, making it especially easy
to build and spin up a new feature.”
Auto-scaling addresses
push notifications during
peak demand periods
Rapid scalability for peak demands was
one big issue they had to address with
creative software engineering and the
Azure Mobile Apps toolset. At 8:00 A.M.
on typical weekday morning, for example,
the 9NEWS Alerts can get 100,000
subscriber requests for traffic conditions.
“With the Azure geo-targeting features,
we’re tracking all these people every
500 meters or so through the network
cell towers as each one of them changes
locations, so we had to figure out how to
deliver that up-to-the-minute information
without bringing down our servers,”
says Rossano Gallardo, NEC Enterprise
Applications Developer. “Azure’s queuing
and service-bus features made it easy to
build in the scalability we needed. Now
we can queue all these closely timed
requests and notifications into batches
with the Azure service bus, and then
release them to the database and push
those updates to where those people are.”
In fact, before the 9NEWS Alerts
development team members turned to the
Azure auto-scaling feature, they had built
their own notification engine. But it was
sized for much smaller scaling demands
compared to what grew out of the huge
success of the 9NEWS Alerts launch. Trying
to push out even 5,000 notifications at
once could have taken hours with servers
running “red hot,” according to Gallardo.
“Now, with Azure Mobile Apps
auto-scaling capabilities enabled, the
9NEWS Alerts app can scale in just a few
seconds from delivering 30,000 to 200,000
geo-specific notifications an hour with no
glitches,” Gallardo says. “Because Azure’s
push-notification feature is separated from
having to deal with the code differences
of various notification platforms, it’s
incredibly simple for us to push our
notifications out in a highly scalable way.”
Xamarin delivers native
code across platforms
Another critically important toolset
used to build the 9NEWS Alerts app
was Xamarin. Provided by a Microsoft
company of the same name, it enabled

4. the team to code the app using C#
and the .NET Framework, and then
deliver iOS and Android versions in
their native code. “Because Xamarin
compiles down to native iOS code and
Android code independently, we get
native performance once it’s actually
deployed to the devices,” Schwebel says.
“Without native code, subtle differences
can really affect the user experience,” he
adds. “You get odd interface behaviors
on your mobile device, like when your
mobile’s browser captures your touches
but scrolling isn’t smooth. That can be due
to a 300-millisecond lag in detecting your
scrolling because it’s trying to detect other
things that the browser wants to do.”
The team also found the disaster-recovery
feature of Azure Web Apps to be quite
useful, because it captures a snapshot of
the app’s code every 60 seconds. “Being
able to wind back to a particular minute in
our coding was fantastic,” Schwebel says.
Creative software
engineering accelerates
time-to-market
Kyefulumya lauds the Azure and Xamarin
tools for helping the NEC IT development
team accelerate the 9NEWS Alerts app’s
development and market introduction.
“Although it’s hard to say exactly how
much we were able to compress our
development cycles and cut our
time-to-market, clearly the powerful
capabilities we got from the many tools
in Microsoft Azure and Xamarin delivered
meaningful time and cost savings,” he says.
As 9News.com.au executive producer,
Paget credits the NEC IT development
team with providing the viewers of NEC’s
other existing news channels with a
differentiated, complementary way to learn
about news that most affects their lives,
while also staying abreast of bigger, more
regional and national stories. “The 9NEWS
Alerts app has exceeded our expectations
in terms of the functionality it can deliver
as well as the number of subscribers it has
attracted,” he says. “Our NEC IT developers
really showed a lot of creative software
engineering in addressing competitive
requirements such as geo-targeted,
location-based services, and also in solving
the scalability issues. Rich features in Azure
provided the tools they needed to do that.”
Software
• Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Azure App Service
- Microsoft Azure Mobile App Services
- Microsoft Azure Media Services
- Microsoft Azure Web Apps
• Microsoft .NET Framework
• Xamarin software
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN
THIS SUMMARY. Document published July 2016.
“Our familiarity with the Microsoft
.NET platform led us to evaluate the
Microsoft Azure App Service, but
the really deciding factors were the
latter’s Mobile Services toolset, such
as push notifications, and its many
other powerful but easy-to-use
features like auto-scaling.”
Wayne Schwebel, Software
Architect/Team Lead, Nine
Entertainment Company