Media platforms are an exercise in extremes - you're moving terabytes a minute, your traffic is more spiky than any other industry, and your audience has been trained by the FAANG-tier incumbents to expect zero buffering, instant search, and pixel-perfect playback. I build media systems with that bar in mind, on top of cloud infrastructure tuned for the realities of egress costs and global delivery.
Video is where the engineering complexity concentrates. ABR ladders (HLS and DASH) tuned to your audience's device mix, codec strategy (H.264/AVC for compatibility, HEVC for 4K, AV1 for premium), DRM via Widevine/PlayReady/FairPlay, and CDN orchestration across multiple providers for resilience. I design ingest pipelines on top of MediaConvert, Mux, or Bitmovin and origin shields that keep cache hit ratios above 95%. The cost difference between a well-tuned and a naive setup is often 3-5x on egress alone.
Recommendations are the single biggest lever on engagement. The progression goes from collaborative filtering to two-tower neural ranking to LLM-augmented content understanding. I build retrieval pipelines that combine vector search over content embeddings with real-time behavioral signals, candidate generation in Redis, and reranking with policy filters for editorial control. The systems that win are the ones that balance personalization with serendipity - algorithms that show users what they'd never search for.
Rights and geo-restrictions are the unglamorous half of streaming. Window deals, regional licensing, MFN clauses, blackout rules - the metadata behind a single title's availability is often more complex than the title itself. I help platforms architect policy engines that evaluate availability per request, integrate with rights management systems like Rightsline, and produce the reporting that SVOD partners require for revenue share.
Creator tooling is where the next decade of media platforms will compete. Studio-grade editing in the browser, AI-assisted captioning and translation, multi-format publishing, and analytics that creators actually understand. I build creator suites that close the loop between content and audience, with workflows that scale from a single creator to a network of thousands. See how I think about media at scale or reach out to discuss your platform.