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Design Netflix (Video Streaming)
End-to-end design of a global video streaming platform serving 250M subscribers across 190 countries, handling 25 Tbps of peak traffic. Covers video ingestion and encoding pipelines, the Open Connect CDN, adaptive bitrate streaming, and recommendation at scale.
Scale & Context
Netflix serves 250–333 million paid subscribers in 190 countries. At peak, it accounts for ~37% of all downstream US internet traffic — approximately 25 Tbps. The system ingests raw video files (often 4K RAW, hundreds of GB per title), encodes them into hundreds of quality variants, stores petabytes of video chunks globally, and delivers them to any device (TV, mobile, browser) on any network condition with < 2 seconds start time and zero buffering. The platform maintains 99.99% availability while deploying dozens of changes daily.