Hello Reader,

A common system design interview question for Media and Entertainment domain is designing high scale live streaming applications. We just had Super Bowl in USA, which is the highest watched event in the USA (126 Million). How do high-scale sporting events like Super Bowl, Olympics, Soccer finals, and Cricket matches get streamed to millions of viewers? And how are personalized dynamic advertisements shown to you? Here's how:

• Live cameras in the stadium capture the action
• AWS Elemental MediaLive takes the raw video input from the cameras into AWS, and encodes it in real-time, compressing the content into smaller, high-quality streams suitable for broadcast and internet delivery. MediaLive also translates the streams into different languages!
• MediaPackage takes the video input and packages it into multiple streaming formats, enabling content delivery to a wide range of playback devices such as connected TVs, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and game consoles
• These various streaming format output is fed to CloudFront. Different devices consume the stream from this CloudFront. You can enable AuthN/Z with CloudFront from the streaming app.
• Elemental MediaPackage can also save the video in S3 bucket for VOD
• All these services can scale automatically to support millions of viewers worldwide!

How about ads? This is how dynamic ad insertion works:

1. CloudFront requests manifest (video clip with ads) with viewer information which is used for ad personalization
2. MediaTailor gets manifest i.e. video clip with ad markers (which time frame to insert the ads). At this point, NO ads have been inserted
3. MediaTailor requests personalized ads based on viewer information from ADS (Ad Decision Server). ADS is a third-party software, that can run on EC2
4. ADS running on EC2 return ad(s) to the MediaTailor. Note that, ads returned for one viewer will vary from another based on the information gathered by the streaming platform, that was passed to MediaTailor
5. Mediatailor inserts these ad(s) into the manifest at the ad markers
6. MediaTailor returns this video clip with ads or manifest with ads to the CloudFront. The clip with ads is shown to the viewers consuming from the CloudFront

If this comes in your system design interview, be sure to knock it out of the park!

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