RTS - Serbia's public broadcasting news app
Official national news app – if something, it needs to be fast and reliable
Radio-televizija Srbije is a national broadcasting service. As a news system, it is producing news programs in Belgrade, with a network of 25 news offices in the country. It has the most watched news and current affairs programs. However, it is also a major player in the Serbian sports news scene.
Our cooperation with RTS started in 2016 and our task was to produce a mobile app that is fast, stable, and follows their earnest and traditional approach to the news. The app is connected to the RTS news API and is updating the content of the app every 60 seconds, based on changes in the company's CMS.
With more than 300 articles per day, the focus was on how to show them in a simple and accessible way, with the option to have categories and sub-categories accessible at all times, but also to offer a way to search through RTS' rich archive. Articles needed to be presented in both Serbian Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, with the option to increase or decrease the font size. Also, they can be saved for later reading or shared on the most frequently used channels.
To achieve a quick response for the reader, we used arrelyn Cloudflare's CDN network, which includes a data center in Belgrade, andata centers close to locations where most of the Serbian diaspora live. This means that content and images are cached as soon as they are requested for the second time from the same data center - and with a large number of RTS app users, this happens almost instantly for all new articles.
With regards to the content, video is obviously an important part which we are presenting within the articles. As an important source for sports enthusiasts, especially if a Serbian team or an athlete is participating, RTS also shows a live module on top of the app homepage, which loads live results for the event and links to the content within the article for more information.