Building a Streaming Service

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2024-10-06 00:30:04

Can one person build a movie and TV streaming platform from scratch? Probably not, but I’m giving it a try—one step at a time.

The technology behind video streaming has always fascinated me. Terms like “encoding” and “transcoding” pop up frequently if you explore this space, and once you start digging into how everything works, it’s easy to get hooked. I certainly did.

In the early days, video streaming was pretty basic—a single video file embedded in a player. But as the demand for streaming grew, so did the complexity. The introduction of the <video> tag in HTML5, the rise of Apple’s HLS protocol, and major innovations from companies like Netflix reshaped the industry. The world was suddenly consuming vast amounts of media, not just porn.

But what if you want to build your own platform from scratch? That’s what I set out to do—one person, one project, and a whole lot of code.