System designHardsd-g249

Subject Video streamingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the DRM and content-protection system for a premium SVOD service that must satisfy studio licensing (Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady) across browsers, mobile, and TVs. Content is encrypted once but must play on all device DRMs, license requests peak at millions per hour around a popular premiere, and you must support concurrent-stream limits and offline downloads. Design the encryption/packaging approach, the license server, and how you enforce per-account stream limits without adding playback latency.

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.