YouTube Video Streaming System

Video upload, transcoding, and adaptive bitrate streaming on GCP handling 500+ hours of video uploaded per minute.

Difficulty: advanced

Tags: video, streaming, transcoding, cdn, gcp

YouTube handles over 500 hours of video uploads every minute and serves billions of views daily. This GCP-native architecture separates the upload pipeline (chunked upload → transcoding via GKE → multiple resolutions in Cloud Storage) from the viewing pipeline (Cloud CDN → adaptive bitrate streaming). Aimed at engineers building video platforms that need adaptive bitrate streaming, automated moderation, and personalized recommendations.