End-to-End Design

Design a service that streams a curated catalog of movies and shows to a global audience, smoothly, on any device and any connection. A studio delivers a high-quality master file for each title; the service transcodes it, stores it, and plays it back on demand. Viewers expect playback to start within a second or two, to stay smooth as bandwidth changes, to seek anywhere in a title, and to resume on a television where they left off on a phone.

The scope here is ingest and delivery: taking a master and making it watchable, then serving it at scale. Home-page ranking and search are a separate recommendation problem; billing is a separate payment problem; the internals of digital rights management (DRM) are named where they touch delivery and otherwise deferred.