Code Room
System designMediumsd-g264
Subject Media systemsLevel Mid–Senior~40 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the audio delivery and offline-download system for a music/podcast app with 200M users, where the same track is streamed and also downloaded for offline playback on phones with limited storage and metered data. Streaming must start in well under a second (instant play on tap), gapless playback between tracks is required, offline downloads must survive app kills and reclaim space intelligently, and licensing requires that offline content expire/revalidate. Design the encoding, the streaming start path, and the offline cache + licensing model.

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.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.