System designHardsd-g054

Subject Content deliveryLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the content-delivery path for live sports streaming to millions of concurrent viewers with <10s glass-to-glass latency. The manifest updates every few seconds as new segments are produced, viewers are on varying bandwidth, and a goal-moment causes a synchronized request spike for the same just-produced segment. Explain segment packaging, caching of live vs VOD content, and how you handle the synchronized stampede on each new segment.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.