Design Netflix Video Streaming

Problem

Design Netflix's global video streaming delivery platform optimized for availability and scale.

Requirements

Functional:

• Stream video to 100s of millions of devices
• Adaptive bitrate by network conditions
• Encode once, serve many device profiles
• Resume playback across devices

Non-functional:

• 200M+ subscribers, petabytes of egress
• Availability over consistency
• Low startup latency and rebuffer rate

Discussion points

1. CDN strategy (Open Connect appliances at ISPs)
2. Encoding/transcoding pipeline (per-title, per-device)
3. Adaptive bitrate (DASH/HLS) and the manifest
4. Region failover and traffic shaping
5. Observability: rebuffer ratio, QoE metrics