Streaming Video Encoding & Packaging Pipeline · View 01 of 22 · Context and scope
Where the boundary is drawn
- Inside: from a verified mezzanine master to an atomically published manifest, plus the lifecycle of every rendition after publication.
- Outside and consumed: the CDN, the player's ABR logic, the DRM licence service, and the rights system that says what may be published where.
- The CDN is excluded on purpose — it is an adjacent use case in this practice, and treating it as a dependency keeps this set about encoding economics rather than edge topology.
Why the dependencies matter
- The DRM licence service is the one dependency with no degraded mode: packaging stalls rather than shipping unencrypted output.
- The rights system gates admission, not publication — a title with no publishable territory never consumes a chunk slot.
- Playback telemetry arrives after the fact and is still load-bearing: it is the second quality gate.
Assumptions
- Assumed 310 supplying rights holders, 1,800 title versions a day, 40 million monthly viewers.
- Subtitles and audio description are authored upstream and arrive as separate tracks; this pipeline multiplexes them but does not create them.
