Design a streaming video platform MVP
Overview
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.
HubSpot
Sep 6, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
0
0
System Design: Streaming Video Platform MVP
Context
Design a Netflix‑like MVP that serves consumer video-on‑demand. Assume:
- Global audience, single cloud provider, 2 regions active‑active.
- Peak: 100k concurrent streams, 1M MAU.
- Catalog: ~10k titles (movies + series). HLS/DASH supported on web, mobile, TV.
Core Use Cases
-
Browse Catalog
- Users browse by genre and by rails such as "Recently Added" and "Top Ten".
-
Play Videos
- Users play at multiple resolutions on diverse devices using adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR).
-
Resume Playback
- The system remembers and restores a user's last play position across devices.
Deliverables
Define the MVP design covering:
- 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.
- Failure handling (e.g., CDN fallback, partial catalog outages).
Solution
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