Media & Entertainment

Al Arabiya breaks the news with an adaptive, real-time CMS

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An online portal for global news that reaches millions

As the Middle East’s most popular news broadcaster, Al Arabiya has two all-news TV channels and nearly 30 offices around the world. With such massive reach over the airwaves, the Al Arabiya website is becoming a primary channel for news as well, with over 200 articles published daily in four languages by 40 web editors and 20,000 visitors per second (roughly 70 million visitors per month).

Accurate news, instantly, around the clock

The web has changed the way broadcasters produce and deliver the news, while audiences demand instant information, 24/7.
Al Arabiya’s online newsroom works around the clock to publish breaking stories in different formats: video on the main news channel, fresh coverage from the editorial team, or short posts and images from social media and viewers sending in content from smartphones and tablets.

Content passes through a complex system of journalistic checks and verifications (which must happen in the blink of an eye yet still be accurate), then moves on to the website, whose infrastructure needs to be robust enough to deliver on-demand video to over 20,000 simultaneous viewers and scale to serve an audience of roughly 70 million visitors per month.

To meet the needs of its impressive viewership, Al Arabiya made the bold decision to upgrade its existing web infrastructure, all while ensuring stability and security against daily hacking attempts.

CMS for journalists, not webmasters

When Tinext assessed the situation, it was clear that selecting the right CMS was vital. Working closely with Al Arabiya, the Magnolia CMS platform was chosen due to its open-source flexibility and ease of integration, extending it with a custom workflow built around Al Arabiya’s editorial needs. The CMS was also integrated with the news channel’s video platform and other existing systems, resulting in a highly customised solution in which CMS was the starting point for development.

The result? A speedy portal built for journalists, not webmasters, that replaced the previous CMS platform – not simply swapping one for the other, but integrating Magnolia into a larger, complex infrastructure.

Thanks to Tinext’s experts, Al Arabiya web editors can now create news stories within Magnolia, drawing content and video directly from the broadcaster’s specialised systems, accessing their Limelight video platform and its media library as a fully integrated app.

Results

<3min

Article cration
vs 10-15 min

10%

Change requests
of the overall project

<20min

sections creation
vs 1 day

1min

Time to be live an article

2steps

for creating and publishing news

11months

to complete the project

2

External repositories
(video/image)

With our previous system it took 10-15 minutes to get a news feature online.
With the new system, this has been reduced to less than three minutes.

Karim Morgan –
CMS architect and project's lead

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