Design a Live Streaming Platform
Last updated: March 3, 2025
Quick Overview
Design low-latency live video streaming with real-time comments, gifting, viewer count aggregation, and recording for VOD conversion.
ByteDance
System Design
Software Engineer
ByteDance
March 3, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Hard
12
4
2,986 solved
Design low-latency live video streaming with real-time comments, gifting, viewer count aggregation, and recording for VOD conversion.
TikTok Live is a major product. Tests understanding of real-time streaming protocols and interactive feature design.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design low-latency RTMP/WebRTC ingest and transcoding
- Implement real-time comment and gift systems
- Build viewer count aggregation at scale
- Handle stream recording for VOD conversion
- Address latency versus quality trade-offs
Key Topics to Cover
Live streaming
RTMP/WebRTC
Real-time interaction
Viewer count aggregation
VOD conversion
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How do you achieve sub-3-second end-to-end latency?
- How do you handle stream quality adaptation for viewers on poor connections?
- How do you detect and filter spam comments in real-time?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Live Video Streaming: Low-latency ingest using RTMP/WebRTC protocols.
- Real-time Comments: Users can send comments during live streams with minimal delay.
- *...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume 100 million monthly active users, with 10% engaging in live streams simultaneously.
- Concurrent Streams: Predicting 1 million concurren...
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