Meitu Internet Technology Salon: Live Streaming Technology Architecture and Practices

The Meitu Internet Technology Salon's fifth edition was held on July 22 in Xiamen, with simultaneous live broadcast on Meipai. Speakers included Hulu senior software engineer Zhang Rui, Meitu senior R&D engineer Zhao Hongzhi, and Meitu senior technical manager Wang Jingbo, who shared insights on live streaming technology.

The salon covered three main topics: Meitu's cloud live streaming media service architecture and optimization practices; Hulu's high-definition live streaming system architecture evolution and practice; and the evolution of Meipai's live bullet‑screen system architecture to support millions of concurrent users.

Zhao Hongzhi described Meitu's self‑built live streaming stack, comprising client SDK, business system, monitoring, scheduling, CDN services, and basic live services. He explained why Meitu built its own origin station: to retain core technology, enable future breakthroughs, and provide a testbed for new products and features.

He outlined Meitu's multi‑center cloud strategy to improve upstream quality, full‑link perception for intelligent diagnostics and traffic scheduling, and extreme client‑side weak‑network optimization to enhance user experience while controlling costs.

Zhang Rui presented Hulu's live streaming system, which is based on the DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) standard. He explained DASH as an HTTP‑based adaptive bitrate format that segments video into small chunks and uses an MPD manifest to enable seamless quality switches without user‑perceivable disruption.

He discussed the benefits of DASH: international standard, forward/backward compatibility, fMP4 packaging, reduced redundancy, and the ability to deliver high‑quality, stutter‑free playback with a single decoder. He also covered sources of latency in live streaming, including downstream processing, encoding/packaging, and transcoding/switching delays.

Wang Jingbo detailed the evolution of Meipai's bullet‑screen system, from an initial rapid‑deployment version to a architecture capable of handling near‑million simultaneous online users. He highlighted the system's long‑connection architecture consisting of push, connection, and routing layers, and explained why certain interactions (gifts, comments) use short connections for sensitivity, while long connections are favored for downstream messaging.

The talk included statistics: Meipai live averages over 100,000 daily broadcasts; TFBoys' four live sessions attracted 28.605 million viewers, 26.23 billion likes, and 29.807 million comments, with peak concurrent audience nearing one million. He also noted Meipai's three‑year anniversary data showing monthly recharge income of 37.41 million RMB in May 2017, reflecting growth driven by live streaming.

The salon concluded with a discussion of future directions, including intelligent dispatch systems guided by full‑link monitoring, and continued investment in technology to support Meitu's vision of “making the world more beautiful”.