Design labs · 5 questions

Design a Video Streaming Platform

"Design a global video streaming platform capable of handling 50,000 video uploads daily and serving over 100 million video hours streamed daily with minimal buffering and adaptive bitrate quality."

Video architectures present unique distributed challenges: massive payload sizes (gigabytes per file), CPU-intensive asynchronous transcoding pipelines, huge global bandwidth egress, and split data models (lightweight relational metadata vs multi-terabyte immutable blob chunks).

Walk through the requirements, storage sizing, transcoding queues, and global CDN delivery network.

Step 1 of 5

Requirements gathering

Which requirements define the core video streaming architecture?

This scenario leans on Caching, CDNs and Edge Delivery and Scaling Basics. Reading one first is a recommendation, never a requirement — and doing the lab cold then reading is a perfectly good order.