Art of Codeartofcode
Lesson 11 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
14
Sources
15
Code lab
41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

41.10 What would you say in the last five minutes?

3 min read+10 XP

Step 6: Wrap-up (5 minutes)

  • Bottlenecks: CDN egress (reserved capacity, multiple CDNs, ISP caches, bitrate caps) and the API tier on spikes (pre-scaling, caching, graceful degradation).
  • Single points of failure: none upstream: paired ingest, encoders and origins in two regions with automatic switchover.
  • Latency: chosen per product: 2-second segments or low-latency modes for sport, with enough buffer to avoid stalls.
  • Rehearsal: load tests at forecast peak, failover drills on the encoder pair, and a runbook for "which features to turn off first".
  • Next with more time: multiple camera angles, DVR rewind, server-side ad insertion stitched into segments, and real-time stats overlays.

Memory code: "Rehearse the peak, double the upstream, cache the downstream, protect the API."