Building an OTT Platform That Won’t Buffer
Adaptive bitrate, signed playback, and the storage/transcode pipeline we run for clients launching subscription video products.
Streaming is solved at the protocol level — the hard part is everything around it: the pipeline that gets the video into the CDN, the auth that gates playback, and the user experience on the device.
The ingest pipeline
Original masters land in S3, trigger an AWS MediaConvert job, and produce a multi-bitrate HLS ladder. The ladder is pushed to CloudFront, and a webhook updates the catalog in the database.
Gating playback
We never expose CDN URLs directly. Every playback URL is signed with a short-lived token issued by the API after the user passes an entitlement check. Tokens are bound to the user and the asset.
Player choice
Mux Player on the web, AVPlayer/ExoPlayer on native. We do not roll our own player — the cost of getting captioning, DRM, and adaptive switching right is too high.