##### Question Design a Netflix-like streaming video platform MVP that supports three main customer use cases: 1. **Browse Catalog** — users browse TV shows and movies by genre and by curated categories such as "Recently Added" and "Top Ten". 2. **Play Videos** — users play videos at different resolutions across device types (web, iOS, Android, smart TV) using adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming. 3. **Resume Playback** — the system remembers and restores a user's last play position so they can continue where they left off across sessions and devices. Work through the full design and be ready to cover: 1. **Service decomposition / overall architecture** — ingestion/transcoding pipeline, metadata & catalog service, search/indexing, playback/ABR, session/auth, CDN, and how the pieces fit together. 2. **Data models** — content/catalog items (movies, series, episodes), video assets and ABR ladder, curated/ranking lists, users/profiles, devices, playback sessions, and watch progress. 3. **API contracts** — catalog browse/search, playback start, heartbeat, stop, and resume/continue-watching state. 4. **Adaptive bitrate streaming** — ABR ladder, HLS/DASH packaging (CMAF), segment sizing, and per-device player support. 5. **Session state & resume** — how playback sessions are tracked, how heartbeats update progress (with debouncing), concurrency limits per account, and how resume is restored across devices. 6. **DRM, licensing, and access control** — multi-DRM (Widevine/FairPlay/PlayReady), CENC, signed/tokenized URLs, and entitlement checks. 7. **"Recently Added" and "Top Ten"** — how to compute, materialize, and surface these rails (definitions, pipelines, and a small ranking example). 8. **Storage, CDN, caching, and consistency** — object storage vs. SQL vs. NoSQL choices, CDN delivery and signing, manifest vs. segment TTLs, and consistency strategy for catalog, rankings, and resume state. 9. **Scalability & availability** — scaling strategies, partitioning, SLOs/SLAs, and capacity targets at peak concurrency. 10. **Content ingestion & indexing** — master upload/validation, transcode/package pipeline, search indexing, and how "Recently Added" is derived. 11. **Cold starts & cache warming** — CDN pre-warming for popular titles, prefetching first segments for fast time-to-first-frame, and service/index warm-up. 12. **Metrics, monitoring, and failure handling** — QoE and backend metrics, observability/tracing, and graceful degradation (CDN fallback, origin/license failover, partial catalog outages, transcode backlog, write failures).

A HubSpot software-engineer onsite system-design question: design a Netflix-like streaming video platform MVP supporting catalog browse (by genre, Recently Added, Top Ten), adaptive-bitrate playback across devices, and cross-device resume. It evaluates service decomposition, data models and API contracts, the ingestion/transcoding pipeline, ABR/DRM delivery, ranking-rail computation, caching/consistency, SLOs and scalability, observability, and failure handling with graceful degradation.

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Design a streaming video platform MVP (Netflix-like)

Question

Design a Netflix-like streaming video platform MVP that supports three main customer use cases:

Browse Catalog — users browse TV shows and movies by genre and by curated categories such as "Recently Added" and "Top Ten".
Play Videos — users play videos at different resolutions across device types (web, iOS, Android, smart TV) using adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming.
Resume Playback — the system remembers and restores a user's last play position so they can continue where they left off across sessions and devices.

Work through the full design and be ready to cover:

Service decomposition / overall architecture — ingestion/transcoding pipeline, metadata & catalog service, search/indexing, playback/ABR, session/auth, CDN, and how the pieces fit together.
Data models — content/catalog items (movies, series, episodes), video assets and ABR ladder, curated/ranking lists, users/profiles, devices, playback sessions, and watch progress.
API contracts — catalog browse/search, playback start, heartbeat, stop, and resume/continue-watching state.
Adaptive bitrate streaming — ABR ladder, HLS/DASH packaging (CMAF), segment sizing, and per-device player support.
Session state & resume — how playback sessions are tracked, how heartbeats update progress (with debouncing), concurrency limits per account, and how resume is restored across devices.
DRM, licensing, and access control — multi-DRM (Widevine/FairPlay/PlayReady), CENC, signed/tokenized URLs, and entitlement checks.
"Recently Added" and "Top Ten" — how to compute, materialize, and surface these rails (definitions, pipelines, and a small ranking example).
Storage, CDN, caching, and consistency — object storage vs. SQL vs. NoSQL choices, CDN delivery and signing, manifest vs. segment TTLs, and consistency strategy for catalog, rankings, and resume state.
Scalability & availability — scaling strategies, partitioning, SLOs/SLAs, and capacity targets at peak concurrency.
Content ingestion & indexing — master upload/validation, transcode/package pipeline, search indexing, and how "Recently Added" is derived.
Cold starts & cache warming — CDN pre-warming for popular titles, prefetching first segments for fast time-to-first-frame, and service/index warm-up.
Metrics, monitoring, and failure handling — QoE and backend metrics, observability/tracing, and graceful degradation (CDN fallback, origin/license failover, partial catalog outages, transcode backlog, write failures).

Question

Design a Netflix-like streaming video platform MVP that supports three main customer use cases:

Browse Catalog — users browse TV shows and movies by genre and by curated categories such as "Recently Added" and "Top Ten".
Play Videos — users play videos at different resolutions across device types (web, iOS, Android, smart TV) using adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming.
Resume Playback — the system remembers and restores a user's last play position so they can continue where they left off across sessions and devices.

Work through the full design and be ready to cover:

Service decomposition / overall architecture — ingestion/transcoding pipeline, metadata & catalog service, search/indexing, playback/ABR, session/auth, CDN, and how the pieces fit together.
Data models — content/catalog items (movies, series, episodes), video assets and ABR ladder, curated/ranking lists, users/profiles, devices, playback sessions, and watch progress.
API contracts — catalog browse/search, playback start, heartbeat, stop, and resume/continue-watching state.
Adaptive bitrate streaming — ABR ladder, HLS/DASH packaging (CMAF), segment sizing, and per-device player support.
Session state & resume — how playback sessions are tracked, how heartbeats update progress (with debouncing), concurrency limits per account, and how resume is restored across devices.
DRM, licensing, and access control — multi-DRM (Widevine/FairPlay/PlayReady), CENC, signed/tokenized URLs, and entitlement checks.
"Recently Added" and "Top Ten" — how to compute, materialize, and surface these rails (definitions, pipelines, and a small ranking example).
Storage, CDN, caching, and consistency — object storage vs. SQL vs. NoSQL choices, CDN delivery and signing, manifest vs. segment TTLs, and consistency strategy for catalog, rankings, and resume state.
Scalability & availability — scaling strategies, partitioning, SLOs/SLAs, and capacity targets at peak concurrency.
Content ingestion & indexing — master upload/validation, transcode/package pipeline, search indexing, and how "Recently Added" is derived.
Cold starts & cache warming — CDN pre-warming for popular titles, prefetching first segments for fast time-to-first-frame, and service/index warm-up.
Metrics, monitoring, and failure handling — QoE and backend metrics, observability/tracing, and graceful degradation (CDN fallback, origin/license failover, partial catalog outages, transcode backlog, write failures).

Design a streaming video platform MVP (Netflix-like)

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Design a streaming video platform MVP (Netflix-like)

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Submit Your Answer to Earn 20XP