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Lesson 13 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)

Variations to practise

3 min read+10 XP

Chapters used

Approach (1), Estimation (2), Polling vs WebSockets (21), Rate limiting (25), CDNs and request collapsing (26), Failures, degradation and failover (29), Observability (30), Video streaming and ABR (40).

Try these variations

Each is a common follow-up. Answer in two minutes, then check the sketch.

  1. "Add 10 language commentary feeds." → Separate audio renditions in the playlist (HLS alternate audio), sharing the same video segments, so caches aren't multiplied.
  2. "Live chat beside the stream." → A separate, sampled and rate-limited chat system; at millions of viewers, show a sample of messages rather than all of them.
  3. "Rewind the last 2 hours." → Keep a longer playlist window and segments for 2 hours; rewinding viewers are spread out, so they hit caches less.
  4. "Personalised ads in the stream." → Server-side ad insertion: stitch ad segments into per-user (or per-segment-of-users) playlists, keeping content segments shared and cacheable.