AdvancedSystem-Design
45 min
Design a Video Streaming Platform
MediaCDNTranscodingSecurity
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Interview Question
Design a video streaming platform supporting uploads, transcoding, adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), DRM, and global delivery.
Key Points to Cover
- Ingest and storage pipeline; chunking and checkpoints
- Transcoding farm: HLS/DASH ABR ladders; queue design
- CDN distribution, origin shield, tokenized URLs
- Player telemetry, QoE metrics, A/B for ladders
- DRM/license servers; watermarking and anti-abuse
Evaluation Rubric
Robust ingest/transcode pipeline25% weight
Efficient global delivery and caching25% weight
QoE metrics and adaptive tuning25% weight
DRM and content protection25% weight
Hints
- 💡Consider pre-transcode vs just-in-time transcoding trade-offs.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Underestimating the complexity and resource demands of large-scale transcoding, especially for ABR ladders and multiple codecs.
- ⚠️Neglecting security aspects like DRM, signed URLs, and API protection, leaving content vulnerable to unauthorized access or theft.
- ⚠️Failing to design for global distribution from the outset, leading to poor user experience (high latency, buffering) for international audiences.
- ⚠️Not implementing a robust, event-driven, asynchronous processing pipeline, which can lead to bottlenecks, single points of failure, and poor fault tolerance.
- ⚠️Overlooking operational concerns such as comprehensive monitoring, logging, alerting, and effective error handling mechanisms, which are crucial for maintaining system health and debugging.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How to handle live streaming?
- ❓How to reduce startup latency?
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