Art of Codeartofcode
Lesson 14 of 15

41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

1
The interview prompt
2
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?
5
41.4 What do we store?
6
41.5 What does the whole system look like?
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41.6 How do live ingest and segmenting work?
8
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?
11
41.10 What would you say in the last five minutes?
12
Score yourself
13
Variations to practise
14
Sources
15
Code lab
41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

Sources

3 min read+10 XP

Source notes

  • Hotstar: 25.3 million concurrent viewers for the India vs New Zealand 2019 World Cup semi-final (Hotstar announcement, July 2019). JioCinema: over 32 million concurrent viewers for the IPL 2023 final (reported May 2023). Checked 2026-10-08.
  • Hotstar engineering on why traditional autoscaling couldn't keep up, load testing and game days: Hotstar engineering blog, "Scaling Infrastructure for Millions"; Hotstar's AWS re:Invent 2019 talk (CMY302). Checked 2026-10-08.
  • Low-latency HLS: Apple's HLS specification and low-latency extensions; RFC 8216 for HLS.
  • Viewer counts used in the design, bitrates, segment lengths, CDN locations and server capacities are interview assumptions agreed in Step 1. Arithmetic computed 2026-10-08.
  • Latency arithmetic, egress and request rates, reactive vs pre-scaled capacity, and spoiler-safe score selection: tested 2026-10-08 (code/ch41_live.py, all checks pass).