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, 2025
Software 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
  1. Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
  2. Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
  3. Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
  4. Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
  5. 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 Problems
Sample Answer
Requirements

Functional Requirements

  1. Live Video Streaming: Low-latency ingest using RTMP/WebRTC protocols.
  2. Real-time Comments: Users can send comments during live streams with minimal delay.
  3. *...
Capacity Estimation

Back-of-Envelope Calculations

  1. User Base: Assume 100 million monthly active users, with 10% engaging in live streams simultaneously.
  2. Concurrent Streams: Predicting 1 million concurren...

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