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Media & Large-Scale FilesHarddesign-video-streaming

Design a Global Video Platform (YouTube / Netflix)

Design an end-to-end video upload, transcoding, and adaptive bitrate streaming platform capable of delivering HD content to global audiences.

Transcoding DAGAdaptive BitrateMulti-CDNPresigned Upload
Traffic & Capacity Estimates:

1 Billion Active Users · 100,000 hrs video uploaded/day · 50 Tbps CDN egress

Functional Requirements

  • •Upload raw video files reliably with resumable uploads.
  • •Transcode video into multiple formats and resolutions (1080p, 720p, 480p, HLS/DASH).
  • •Stream video smoothly with adaptive bitrate adjustment based on viewer bandwidth.

Non-Functional Requirements

  • •Zero buffer stalls during playback.
  • •High availability and global distribution via multi-CDN edge caching.
  • •Scalable asynchronous transcoding worker pipeline.

Back-of-the-Envelope Math

  • 100K hours of video uploaded daily (~500 TB raw storage per day).
  • Playback traffic: 50 Terabits/sec peak CDN egress.

Key Architectural Trade-offs

  • Chunked upload directly to Blob Storage (S3) via pre-signed URLs vs streaming through API servers.
  • Asynchronous message-driven transcoding DAG pipeline (Kafka + worker pool) vs synchronous job execution.
  • Adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH) with edge CDN caching vs origin server streaming.

Click or drag a component onto the canvas, then connect the handles to draw the data flow.

3 nodes · 2 edges

Components · 35

Client & Edge4
Compute & Gateway7
Storage & Caching11
Messaging & Streaming6
Coordination & Ops5
Intelligence2
Canvas overview
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