Design a Short-Video Streaming Platform
Last updated: March 3, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the end-to-end pipeline from video upload to playback: ingestion, transcoding, storage, CDN distribution, and adaptive bitrate streaming.
ByteDance
System Design
Software Engineer
ByteDance
March 3, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Hard
8
9
2,243 solved
Design the end-to-end pipeline from video upload to playback: ingestion, transcoding, storage, CDN distribution, and adaptive bitrate streaming.
Core infrastructure question for ByteDance. Tests knowledge of video processing pipelines, CDN architecture, and handling viral content spikes.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design video ingestion with chunked upload support
- Implement transcoding pipeline for multiple resolutions and codecs
- Address CDN distribution with cache warming for viral content
- Design adaptive bitrate streaming with HLS/DASH
- Handle viral traffic spikes without degradation
Key Topics to Cover
Video transcoding
CDN architecture
Adaptive bitrate streaming
Chunked upload
Viral content handling
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 handle videos that go viral within minutes?
- What is your cost optimization strategy for storage tiers?
- How do you ensure consistent playback quality across regions?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Video Upload: Users can upload videos in chunks (e.g., 5MB each) to ensure reliability.
- Transcoding: The system should transcode videos into multiple res...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming ByteDance has a user base of 1 billion users with an average of 10 million new video uploads daily:
- Daily Uploads: 10 million uploads
- Average Video Size: 100 MB
- **Total Daily ...
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