60 minutes on this and I still felt like I barely scratched the surface.
Start by clarifying requirements and constraints, then outline a high-level architecture covering ingestion, storage, processing, and delivery. Dive into key components like CDN, transcoding, and adaptive bitrate streaming, discussing trade-offs and scalability.
Pro tip: Emphasize trade-offs between latency, quality, and cost, and how you would monitor and optimize the system using metrics like startup time and rebuffering ratio.
Ask about scale (users, concurrent streams), content types (live vs. on-demand), latency requirements, and budget constraints.
Sketch the main components: ingestion, transcoding, storage, CDN, and client players. Explain data flow from source to viewer.
Discuss transcoding (formats, bitrates), storage (object storage, caching), and delivery (CDN, adaptive bitrate streaming).
Explain how to handle spikes, ensure fault tolerance, and use load balancing, replication, and monitoring.
Compare latency vs. quality, cost vs. performance, and suggest optimizations like edge computing or peer-to-peer.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.