Design a streaming video platform MVP
Company: HubSpot
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a streaming video platform MVP (Netflix-like) that supports three main customer use cases:
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1) Browse Catalog: users browse TV shows and movies by genre and categories such as 'recently added' and 'top ten';
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2) Play Videos: users play videos at different resolutions on different devices with adaptive bitrate streaming; and
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3) Resume Playback: the system remembers and restores a user's last play position across devices. Define the overall architecture (ingestion/transcoding pipeline, metadata/catalog service, playback/ABR, CDN, session/auth), API endpoints and data models for catalog browse and playback state, mechanisms to compute and surface 'recently added' and 'top ten', DRM and access control basics, consistency and caching strategies, scalability/availability targets, metrics/analytics collection, and failure handling (e.g., CDN fallback, partial catalog outages).
Quick Answer: This question evaluates proficiency in designing end-to-end streaming video platforms, emphasizing scalable distributed architecture and operational competencies across ingestion/transcoding, metadata/catalog services, adaptive bitrate playback, CDN/edge delivery, DRM and access control, APIs, caching, and failure handling.