Design a video streaming platform like Netflix/YouTube
Company: HubSpot
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
## System Design
Design a large-scale video streaming platform similar to Netflix/YouTube.
### Core user stories
1. Upload (creator) / ingest (studio) videos.
2. Browse/search a catalog.
3. Start playback quickly and stream smoothly (adaptive bitrate).
4. Resume playback across devices.
5. (Optional) Recommendations and personalized home feed.
### Requirements
#### Functional
- Video upload/ingestion and processing (transcode, thumbnails, captions).
- Video metadata (title, description, tags, privacy/availability).
- Playback via multiple bitrates and device formats.
- Basic analytics (views, watch time).
#### Non-functional
- Low startup latency, minimal buffering.
- Highly available playback.
- Global delivery.
- Secure content access (signed URLs/DRM optional).
### Scale assumptions (you may choose reasonable numbers)
- Millions of daily active users.
- Large video library (PB-scale storage).
- Global traffic spikes.
Explain your architecture, APIs, data storage choices, caching/CDN strategy, and how you handle scaling and reliability.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing large-scale video streaming systems, covering distributed systems architecture, scalability, storage and data modeling, API design, content processing, content delivery and playback performance.