Design a video-on-demand streaming service

Q: Design a video-on-demand streaming service

This is a System Design interview question from Roku for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

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Scenario

Design a large-scale video-on-demand (VOD) streaming service similar to a major streaming platform.

Users should be able to:

Sign in and browse a catalog of movies/shows
Click a title and start playback on web/mobile/TV apps
Seek/pause/resume and continue watching across devices
Stream smoothly under varying network conditions

Content providers should be able to:

Upload video assets
Have videos processed (transcoded) into multiple qualities
Publish titles to the catalog

Assumptions (you can adjust during discussion)

Global users, multi-region
Millions of daily active users
A typical title is hours long; streaming uses segmented adaptive bitrate

What to cover

Requirements (functional + non-functional)
APIs/interfaces (high level)
High-level architecture and core services
Storage choices and data modeling
CDN/edge strategy, caching, and adaptive bitrate streaming
Transcoding pipeline
Scalability, reliability, and observability
Key trade-offs (latency vs. cost vs. consistency)

Design a video-on-demand streaming service

Scenario

Assumptions (you can adjust during discussion)

What to cover

Solution

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