Why Real-Time Notifications Matter

When your video platform fetches new trending content every 2 hours across 8 regions, users shouldn't have to refresh to see what's new. At DailyWatch , we built a WebSocket notification layer that pushes "new trending video" alerts to every connected browser tab the moment our cron pipeline finishes.

In this article, I'll walk through the full implementation using Python's websockets library.

The Architecture

The flow is straightforward:

Cron job fetches new videos and writes them to SQLite

Cron job sends a POST to our WebSocket server with the new video IDs

WebSocket server broadcasts a notification to all connected clients

Browser clients display a toast notification

Setting Up the WebSocket Server

Install the dependency:

pip install websockets

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Here's the core server with connection management and broadcast:

import asyncio import json import websockets from datetime import datetime from typing import Set

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