Design Video Streaming

"Design a video streaming service" is the system-design shape Amazon reaches for most. It usually arrives framed as Prime Video or "design a video platform." It earns that spot because one prompt exercises every muscle the round scores: huge object storage, an asynchronous processing pipeline, a read path that dwarfs the write path, and a global delivery story. The interviewer hands you the broad shape, then picks one piece and pushes hard.

Anchor on the numbers first, and state your assumptions out loud so the interviewer can correct them. Say Prime Video has on the order of 50 million daily viewers, each watching roughly two hours a day. That is about 100 million viewing hours a day going out. Ingest is tiny against it. Prime Video is a curated catalog of studio and partner titles. New content trickles in (call it a few thousand title-encodes a day during catalog refreshes) while the same titles are streamed billions of times. So reads beat writes by a huge margin, billions of streams against a few thousand encodes. The design hangs on stating that asymmetry up front.

The Amazon angle

This prompt lands differently at Amazon. The 16 Leadership Principles are graded inside the design round itself, never siloed into a separate slot. Customer Obsession shows up the moment you ask whether a buffering stream ruins movie night. Dive Deep is the interviewer pressing on exactly how the CDN stays warm when a new season drops to tens of millions of people at once. And Ownership shows up in how you narrate a pipeline an Amazon team runs end to end, reasoning about how it degrades and recovers well past the happy path. Two practical notes on top. You design this in a plain editor with no diagramming tool, so practice narrating an architecture in words rather than a drawing. And Amazon runs this stack itself: Prime Video is served off AWS, which sells the building blocks as products (S3 for the bytes, MediaConvert for transcoding, CloudFront for delivery). You won't be asked to recite the names, but reaching for the right category reads as Amazon-fluent.