Break.com: the internet's #1 video site for years

The challenge

Break.com had to handle consumer video at a moment when almost nobody knew how. Uploads arrived in every format a camcorder or early phone could produce. Traffic didn't grow on a smooth curve — a single clip going viral could multiply load in hours, with no warning and no time to provision. Every part of the system was tested at once: ingest, transcoding, storage, delivery, and the front end that had to keep loading while all of it was under pressure. There was no playbook to copy. The reference architectures for video at that scale didn't exist yet, so the platform had to be designed, measured, and corrected in production.

Our approach

We built for the spike rather than the average. Uploads and transcoding were pushed into asynchronous pipelines so a flood of new video never blocked playback for people already watching. Delivery was distributed to edge caches so the origin served a small fraction of total requests. The site was engineered so the paths that carried the most traffic — the player, the browse page, the top-of-site feed — stayed light and heavily cached, while heavier, less-used features degraded gracefully instead of taking the platform down with them. We instrumented everything, watched where the system bent under real load, and kept reworking the bottleneck that mattered most that week.

What we built

• A high-volume video ingest and transcoding pipeline that normalized every submitted format into consistent playback profiles
• A distributed delivery architecture with aggressive edge caching, keeping origin load flat during viral traffic spikes
• A content browsing and discovery experience designed to stay fast under sustained concurrent load
• A moderation and publishing workflow that let a small editorial team manage a very large volume of user-submitted content
• Monitoring across ingest, encoding, delivery, and front-end performance, so failures surfaced before users reported them

Results