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News doesn’t behave like other content.
It doesn’t stream on a schedule, follow predictable usage patterns, or live neatly in a cache. It breaks without warning, travels fast, and hits every surface from mobile push to smart TV apps at the same time.
From a system architecture perspective, news apps aren’t just video platforms. They’re real-time systems with radically different constraints.
They need to handle:
Most off-the-shelf video stacks weren’t built for this.
And unless you’re operating at BBC scale, building this kind of system from scratch is going to take more than just cloud credits and good intentions.
That’s why later in this guide, we’ll show how teams are skipping the custom build entirely using FastPix to handle the video complexity behind real-time news delivery. No edge pipeline assembly, no DIY playback logic. Just APIs that already do the hard parts.
But first, let’s look at what the architecture really needs to support.
Here’s what the system behind a fast, resilient, video-powered news app actually looks like and why each layer matters.
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Client layer: Web, iOS, Android, and OTT platforms all talk to the backend differently. You’re not just building one app you’re serving a fragmented ecosystem with different playback behaviors, push notification systems, and network conditions. The architecture has to account for that fragmentation.
API gateway: Every request hits the gateway first. It handles rate limiting, authentication, and routing to the right microservice. More importantly, it protects your core logic from getting overwhelmed when a news alert goes viral.
Microservices backend: Auth, CMS, personalization, video, notifications each service runs independently. That means one bug doesn’t take down the whole stack. It also means your recommendation engine can be deployed twice a day without touching live playback.
Media pipeline: This is where raw video becomes usable. A typical flow looks like: ingest → transcode → package → store → deliver. Whether it’s a breaking livestream or an uploaded highlight, it needs to hit that pipeline and be stream-ready in seconds not minutes.
Data systems: There’s no one-size-fits-all database. SQL handles users and sessions. NoSQL powers flexible content objects. Elasticsearch makes search feel instant. Redis keeps latency low on the home feed. Every workload gets its own optimized store.
Infrastructure orchestration: Everything runs in containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes or ECS. CI/CD pipelines handle deploys with rollback safety built in. The goal is to ship quickly and recover instantly when something goes sideways.
CDN and edge logic: Video delivery happens at the edge. CDN nodes cache streams close to users. Device-aware logic determines bitrate, resolution, and failover. When millions tune in at once, this is what keeps playback smooth and origin traffic under control.
This isn’t an abstract reference model. It’s the baseline setup for any news platform that wants to scale fast, stream instantly, and personalize in real time.
To know more on what architecture or feature you can include in your news app check out our tutorial on : How to build a news streaming app.
News apps don’t just stream video they run continuous live broadcasts, surface breaking clips, and stitch replays into personalized feeds. CBS News, for example, runs a 24/7 channel alongside short-form segments and contextual embeds, all in real time.
The architecture behind this balances live reliability with fast-turnaround VOD. Here’s how it works at the system level:
Design constraints drive every part of this pipeline. Latency has to stay under five seconds for live video. Streams need to switch rapidly when a control room changes feeds. Ads and captions must be inserted without adding load times or disrupting playback.
Key requirements:
This system isn’t just for smooth playback it’s about keeping up with real-time news cycles, where delays cost attention, and attention is everything.
At CBS News, the CMS isn’t just where articles get published it’s where video gets routed, clipped, and distributed at scale.
Every piece of live or recorded footage needs to move fast from ingest to playback across mobile apps, OTT platforms, Apple News, and even smart speakers. And it all starts with how the CMS handles video as a first-class citizen.
Live segments and breaking footage are linked directly into the CMS workflow. Editors can preview a live stream, mark in/out points, and publish clips within seconds of broadcast. This is powered by deep integration between the CMS and the live-to-VOD pipeline no switching tools, no manual uploads.
The system also applies automated metadata enrichment. As video is ingested, it’s tagged using NLP models, facial recognition, and scene detection. This metadata doesn’t just help with organization it directly powers personalized feeds, video search, and content ranking algorithms downstream.
APIs expose this enriched video content to apps, homepages, and feeds in real time. When a new clip is published or a breaking live segment goes up, every surface updates instantly no deploy required. That includes web embeds, Apple News, OTT layouts, and RSS.
Under the hood, CBS uses a publish-subscribe model to keep everything in sync. When a new video goes live whether it’s a VOD replay or a live event the CMS sends that update through Kafka or Redis Streams, pushing changes to playback apps, recommendation engines, and multi-CDN edge caches.
Key capabilities built into the CMS layer:
At this scale, the CMS becomes a switchboard one that connects video processing, personalization, and publishing into a single editorial flow.
When you open the CBS News app, you don’t just see what’s trending you see what’s relevant to you. Local breaking alerts, replays from your region, coverage tuned to your interests. That’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between feeling informed and feeling overwhelmed.
This experience is powered by a layered personalization system that ranks, filters, and adapts content across articles, videos, and live streams in real time.
At the center is a hybrid recommendation engine, combining collaborative filtering (what users like you are watching) with content-based matching using NLP. That means the system can recommend a clip not just because it’s popular, but because it matches the context of what you’ve read, watched, or searched for.
Feeds are dynamic. As watch time, shares, and reading behavior spike, a trending pipeline recalculates weightings and elevates breaking stories that are gaining traction. At the same time, geo-personalization ensures that what’s featured in New York isn’t necessarily what’s shown in London.
Search is tightly integrated with personalization. Users expect to search across everything article bodies, tags, video metadata, and even spoken words inside video. This is made possible by semantic search systems that index video transcripts alongside written content.
How feeds are sorted depends on a combination of recency, relevance, and click prediction models. The goal isn’t just to show what’s new, but what’s likely to matter based on who the user is and what they’ve already engaged with.
To power this, CBS-style platforms use a blend of real-time processing and retrieval systems:
CBS News runs across a dozen surfaces web, mobile apps, smart TVs, OTT platforms and the experience has to feel consistent, fast, and native on each one. That’s not a front-end design problem. It’s a delivery architecture problem.
On web, CBS uses server-side rendering frameworks like Next.js to optimize for fast load times and SEO. For mobile and OTT, native SDKs on iOS, Android, Roku, and Fire TV provide tighter system integration and smoother playback. A shared design system ensures visual consistency across platforms while letting teams move fast with reusable components.
Under the hood, the architecture uses a backend-for-frontend (BFF) pattern. Each client talks to its own lightweight API layer, designed specifically for its needs. The web frontend gets structured JSON for hydration. Mobile apps get compact responses optimized for bandwidth and caching.
To power this, CBS relies on GraphQL APIs. Editors and developers can query exactly what they need nothing more, nothing less. This cuts down on over-fetching and makes personalization easier to manage at the edge.
Local storage (or SQLite on mobile) supports offline reading, especially important for commuters or international users with limited connectivity. And for real-time updates breaking banners, live tickers, or stream alerts the system uses Server-Sent Events (SSE) or WebSockets to push changes without constant polling.
On the media side, CBS optimizes aggressively.
Images are served through a CDN with on-the-fly resizing and format switching to AVIF or WebP. Video streams are resolution-aware, with device-specific packaging that accounts for screen size and connection quality. Lazy loading ensures that media doesn’t block the critical path especially important when embedding video across news articles.
When CBS News covers a major election or global event, traffic doesn’t scale gradually it surges in seconds. Millions of users hit the app, start streams, reload feeds, and open push notifications. The architecture isn’t just built to scale it’s built to absorb spikes without flinching.
Traffic flows through a combination of NGINX and AWS Elastic Load Balancers, distributing requests across services and regions. For delivery, CBS uses multi-CDN routing with Fastly, CloudFront, and Akamai. This lets the platform respond to regional outages or latency spikes by rerouting traffic automatically.
To stay ahead of known spikes like a primetime debate or scheduled release CBS pre-caches assets and video manifests across its CDNs. This reduces origin load and guarantees faster time-to-play under pressure.
On the backend, containers are deployed on Kubernetes with auto-scaling rules that respond to CPU, memory, or queue depth. When video encoding jobs pile up or traffic surges on content APIs, new pods spin up without manual intervention.
Content storage is sharded across NoSQL databases to distribute read/write pressure. For SQL-heavy operations like user auth, subscriptions, or transactions, read replicas ensure that the primary DB isn’t overloaded.
CBS engineers take reliability seriously. Inspired by Netflix’s approach to chaos engineering, internal systems run failure injection tests to simulate outages, kill services, and test how quickly things recover. These tests reveal weak points long before users ever feel the impact.
Let’s be honest. What you’ve seen in this guide the architecture behind CBS News-level performance takes serious engineering.
You’re dealing with live ingest pipelines, VOD clipping, multi-CDN routing, CMS-video workflows, recommendation engines, GraphQL feeds, region-aware personalization, observability stacks, failover logic… the list doesn’t end. And none of it is optional if you're aiming for a reliable, real-time video experience at scale.
Doing this in production means infrastructure decisions, staffing, ops overhead, edge debugging, and weeks of just getting the basic version stable. That’s before you even get to analytics, monetization, or rollout across platforms.
Most teams don’t have time for that.
FastPix was built for teams that want the custom architecture without rebuilding the stack from scratch. It’s a developer-first platform that gives you video ingest, encoding, packaging, playback, analytics, and edge delivery in one API layer.
With FastPix, you can launch cross-platform video features that just work on iOS, Android, web, and OTT without fighting SDKs or maintaining custom pipelines.
Why teams choose FastPix:
You don’t need a custom video backend to break news fast. You need a stack that’s ready when you are.
FastPix gives developers, newsrooms, and media teams a real alternative to DIY infrastructure without sacrificing performance, control, or flexibility. Whether you’re a lean team shipping fast, or a large media brand modernizing legacy systems, FastPix helps you focus on content, not complexity. If you want to know more how FastPix fits your workflow you can check our tutorial on how to build a news streaming app or explore the FastPix Docs to get started, or talk to us about integrating video into your newsroom workflow.
Yes, FastPix provides HLS playback URLs and supports custom player integration. You can embed streams using any HLS-compatible player (like Video.js or JW Player) and even configure playback settings via API for full control over how the stream appears in your app or website.
FastPix is built for real-world conditions. It uses adaptive bitrate streaming and SRT/RTMPS support to recover from unstable networks. If the connection drops, FastPix will resume the stream once the connection is restored, and your recording will continue without needing to start over.
Using FastPix’s real-time clipping API, you can automatically create and publish highlight reels right after (or even during) the service. No manual trimming or re-uploading needed just programmatically define the timestamps and publish the clip via API.
In 2025, the best way to stream church services is through API-based platforms like FastPix that offer adaptive streaming, real-time recording, and direct integration with existing tools like OBS. They’re reliable, scalable, and don’t require expensive hardware or complex setup.
Small churches can live stream affordably using a smartphone or DSLR, a stable internet connection, and a platform like FastPix. With built-in encoding support, adaptive bitrate delivery, and real-time archiving, even non-technical volunteers can manage the entire broadcast from a laptop or phone.
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