Design a Netflix-like video platform

Q: Design a Netflix-like video platform

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

Scenario

Design a Netflix-like platform that supports:

Search for videos (by title, tags, people, etc.)
Stream videos to web/mobile/TV clients
Upload videos (assume both user-generated uploads and studio uploads)

Requirements

Functional

Users can browse/search a catalog and view metadata (title, description, thumbnails).
Users can stream a selected video with adaptive bitrate (ABR) and resume playback.
Content providers can upload a video, which becomes available for streaming after processing.

Non-functional

Low startup latency, smooth playback, global availability.
High reliability, fault tolerance, and observability.
Content protection support (at least tokenized URLs; optionally DRM).

Assumptions (you may refine)

50M DAU, peak 5M concurrent streams.
Global audience; multi-region deployment.
Typical video sizes: 1–10 GB source; multiple encoded renditions.

Deliverables

Explain:

APIs (client-facing and uploader-facing)
Data model and storage choices
High-level architecture (upload/processing pipeline, streaming delivery path, search)
Caching/CDN strategy
Reliability, consistency, and scaling trade-offs
Monitoring, rate limiting, abuse prevention