How does Live Streaming Work [System Design Sundays]

How Does Live Streaming Platform Work? (YouTube live, Twitch, TikTok Live, Instagram Live)

Oct 03, 2022

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Today we will be visiting one of the favorites in Systems Design Interviews,

How would you design a Live Streaming Platform? Whether it’s Twitch, YouTube, Tik Tok, IG Live, FB they all rely on live streaming pretty heavily. To ace your interviews, it’s important to have this and its cousins on Lock.

I have an amazing video for you. It will give you a good overview of the live streaming system. It’s pretty short and concise (but with a lot of information), so it doesn’t make sense for me to give you a summary. However, as you watch this, I want you to keep a few things in mind-

Points to note

Life is complex- When you start studying systems design, you will find that the systems you deal with are extremely complex. These were built by millions of people, over decades. I know I’m not making any shocking claims here, but this is important to note because a lot of people overlook this and make a huge mistake when studying for their systems design interviews.
The big sin you will probably make- What is this mistake? Trying to study everything. Just in the video, you will come across adaptive bit rate, DNS, Encoders, and much more. This video doesn’t mention The biggest mistake you can make is trying to study them all. This will overwhelm you and lead to worse performance overall.
Dealing with this- So what should you do? Study what you know/are interested in/understand/is related to your work. Skip what doesn’t match this. Systems Design Interviews are deliberately open-ended. You can take them in whichever direction you want. As you start off, try to guide your interview into your area of expertise and focus on that. Remember, no reasonable interviewer expects you to build billion-dollar systems in 1 hour. They are testing your ability to manage stakeholder needs, ability to handle ambiguity, and ability to foresee challenges. Play to your strengths.
What about the rest- I’m not asking you to completely overlook everything else. That would be too risky. What I am saying is that you should do the bare minimum there. If you had to study network transmission protocols- study the differences between TCP, UDP, etc. There’s no reason to get a Ph.D. on it. You just need to know enough to identify which procedure would be useful in what circumstance. Once you know that move on to what you like.
A note on engineering blogs- This is one reason engineering blogs and whitepapers are so cool. They will teach you what people are actually doing. If you can casually mention, “Netflix does …” even if you don’t understand that super in-depth, you will stand out.

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