Doordarshan is India's national public broadcaster — it has been on air since 1959 and reaches over 600 million viewers. When we were brought in to re-architect their web presence, the scope was unlike anything I had worked on before.
The challenge wasn't just scale. It was diversity. Doordarshan operates multiple regional portals, each with its own editorial team, language requirements, and content calendar. Any architecture had to support independent deployments per portal while sharing a common infrastructure backbone.
We settled on a Next.js-based multi-site architecture deployed on a cloud provider with edge caching. Each regional portal is a separate Next.js application that shares a component library and a centralised CMS API. Content editors work in a custom headless CMS; the portals consume data via REST APIs and cache aggressively at the CDN layer.
Multilingual support was one of the harder problems. Indian language rendering — particularly for scripts like Devanagari, Telugu, and Tamil — requires careful font loading strategy and locale-aware date/number formatting. We built a locale configuration layer that drives both the content-fetching logic and the UI rendering without duplicating components.
The most stressful moment was go-live. National broadcaster infrastructure can't have outages — the reputational risk is enormous. We ran a two-week parallel-run with the old system, validating every route and every content type before cutting over DNS. It went smoothly, which is exactly what success looks like at this scale: nothing newsworthy happened.