Rebuilding the European Commission's largest audiovisual portal

Challenge

The portal serves journalists, broadcasters, and citizens across all 27 member states. Built on AngularJS 1.x, it was unmaintainable: dependency rot, no path to modern accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.2 AA was now mandatory under the EU Accessibility Act), and rendering performance unacceptable for live press events. The Commission's communication directorate needed real-time publishing during live press conferences — the legacy stack couldn't deliver content updates in under 8-10 seconds.

Approach

Greenfield rebuild on Next.js with server-side rendering for SEO and accessibility, a headless CMS for the editorial team, and a WebSocket-based live channel for press-event updates. Migrated 12 years of archive content (~280K assets) without breaking permalinks. Designed and tested for 27 languages including RTL. Audited and certified WCAG 2.2 AA across the platform.

Outcomes

• Live press-event content updates in under 1.5 seconds
• WCAG 2.2 AA certified across all 27 language versions
• Lighthouse performance score 94+ on key landing pages
• Editorial team publishes 4x more content per day with the same headcount