Design a streaming video platform MVP

Q: Design a streaming video platform MVP

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

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Question

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).

Design a streaming video platform MVP

System Design: Streaming Video Platform MVP

Context

Core Use Cases

Deliverables

Solution (Locked)

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