What backend technologies and streaming protocols are best suited for building a scalable movie streaming website?
Are you building it for commercial use or just for a project, like for fun?
If you are looking to build one just for fun, use any backend which you are comfortable with or the language you want to learn. You can use either one for backend -
- Node.js (non-blocking io, event-driven, excellent for real-time
- Python (Django/flask)
- Java Spring Boot (mature, enterprise grade scalability)
- Ruby on Rails
- Tornado (Python)
For the streaming protocols use HLS.
You might want to also use CDN like cloudflare to distribute to a varied geographical landscape.
But again depends heavily on your use case and end goal.
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Why not use solarmovies, watchhq, or something like that?
If you want to DIY, you can host movies on Google drive, get an index script, and host on cloudflare workers. Works as a charm. Streaming requires steady internet though.
This is probably a bot.
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Damn bots!
You can checkout this blog - https://raindance.org/build-a-movie-streaming-website-to-showcase-your-films-in-2025/
Author - emiley madison
Also has the same profile pic as you. What are the odds
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Discourse is too popular and there is substantially more bot signups compared to other forum options.
On a discourse forum I manage, we had to toggle signup to approve each new user manually.
I am not bot 
thanks for sharing my article. I have some technical doubts to scale up movie streaming website. So I have asked that question. kindly share if you have valuable answer.
Your blog covers everything except the most important points. For starters I’d suggest you to host a simple nginx server on your windows/linux PC, add a few 4k h.265 movies. Play the files on just 20-30 devices and you’ll hit internet bandwidth before your pc throttles.
In real world scenario the server would be optimised on a different scale, containerisation for scaling, CDN is a must as others pointing out. I’ve worked on several projects that on monolithic architectures and on Asia’s largest containerised architecture, on cloud infra with $2M+ monthly bills, even they tend to fail in stability because of misjudging operations cost and impacting performace. my advice is, focus most importantly on optimization and performance when starting out, forget about profits the first few years and you should be good to go.
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