The Olympic Games are a unique challenge for broadcasters. More than 330 events are packed into just 17 days of intense activity, as 11,000-plus athletes compete in 50 sporting disciplines. And as Japan’s most-trusted news source, NHK is expected to provide accurate, up-to-the-minute, detailed coverage in real-time for the country’s 126 million people.
That’s why NHK asked The Plant to create a high-performance custom content platform ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, ready to offer seamless service to a national audience.
World-class speed and stability
The Plant developed the brief with several weeks of investigation into workflows at NHK's operation room. With approvals required from multiple stakeholders within the company, as well as the famously strict International Olympic Committee, The Plant created a 100-page document of specifications for everything from security to integrations.
Understanding workflows helped the team identify specific problems in the delivery of real-time coverage. Breaking news online means making edits to a story as it develops, which can lead to multiple, conflicting versions of a story. Disentangling them is an unwelcome task in a busy operation room, so the new platform features a simplified user interface, clear numbering of versions, a calendar view on publication times, and features to leave notes for colleagues and receive notifications.
NHK anticipated that operation room to involve 200 people from both inside and outside the company interacting with the CMS. Granular permissions maintain security across these logins, while the system architecture itself defends against hacking attempts, thanks to a CMS kept completely separate from the website, a solution tested and approved by a leading international accountancy firm.
That innovative separation in the system architecture delivers outstanding stability even at high traffic volumes. Rather than risk overloading servers by handling requests directly at the CMS, the solution intelligently publishes static content to the cloud.
This cost-effective approach protects the integrity of the CMS from surges in traffic, while delivering fast, high-quality content to readers in near-real-time.
Building trust
Completed on schedule, the platform was approved by all stakeholders including the International Olympics Committee, passed security review by a world-leading accountancy firm, and was rapidly picked up by users at NHK. Thanks to the stability of the platform architecture, NHK can depend on the solution to work without constant human monitoring, reducing costs. And the innovative architecture developed for this project is now part of every CMS produced by The Plant, delivering world-class performance and stability to customers, no matter the load.
