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Lesson 1 of 15

41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

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The interview prompt
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41.1 What do you ask first?
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41.2 How big is this, really?
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41.3 What are the doors?
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41.4 What do we store?
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41.5 What does the whole system look like?
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41.6 How do live ingest and segmenting work?
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41.7 How does the CDN cope at peak?
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41.8 How do you pre-scale for spikes?
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41.9 How does live score sync work?
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41.10 What would you say in the last five minutes?
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Score yourself
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Variations to practise
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Sources
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Code lab
41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

The interview prompt

3 min read+10 XP

This chapter is a full interview round, played out step by step. The interviewer's lines are in quotes. At each step you'll see what a strong candidate says, the pushback the interviewer throws, and how to answer it. At the end, grade yourself with the rubric.

How to use this chapter

  1. Read only the prompt below. Then stop.
  2. Set a 45-minute timer and do the whole round yourself, on paper or a whiteboard, out loud. Use the framework from Chapter 1: READ, then Draw, Dive, Defend.
  3. Then read the walkthrough and compare. Score yourself with the rubric at the end.

Chapter 40 handled video on demand, where traffic is spread over millions of videos and hours. Live sport is the opposite: one stream, everyone at once, and the crowd doubles in minutes when a famous batter walks out. Streaming services in India have reported over 25 million concurrent viewers for a single cricket match (Hotstar, 2019 World Cup semi-final) and 32 million for the IPL 2023 final (JioCinema).

The prompt

"Design live streaming for a big cricket match: tens of millions of people watching the same live stream on their phones, with the live score shown alongside."

Stop here. Start your timer.