Art of Codeartofcode
Lesson 5 of 15

41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

1
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
15
Code lab
41. Design Live Streaming at Scale (Live Cricket)

41.4 What do we store?

3 min read+10 XP
live segments object storage / origin, short retention (+ DVR window, e.g. 2 hours) playlists rolling: the latest N segments, rewritten every segment matches match_id, feeds, start time, status entitlements user → subscription / free access (cached heavily before the match) score events match_time, event, score text (from the official data feed)

Interviewer pushback:

  • "Why does the score carry match_time?" → So the app can show the score for the moment the viewer is watching, not for the real present, which may be 20 seconds ahead (41.9).

Memory code: "Sign the playlist once; let the edge check it; stamp every score with match time."