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QuestionsTechnical PMNetflix

What API and data model would support a new Live Events workflow for kids and parents

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Netflix is a streaming entertainment company; its products include subscription video, original films and series, recommendations, profiles, games, and ad-supported plans.

Netflix is exploring a Live Events experience tailored to kids and parents, where families can discover, schedule, join, and manage live programming such as premieres, interactive shows, sports-adjacent family events, or creator-led specials. The workflow must account for two related but distinct users: children using a Kids profile with age-appropriate controls, and parents or guardians who may approve access, set reminders, manage viewing rules, and co-watch.

Your task is to describe the API surface and data model that would support this workflow. Focus on the product and technical requirements needed to power client experiences across TVs, mobile devices, tablets, and web, while respecting Netflix-scale expectations around personalization, localization, parental controls, live-stream reliability, and account/profile boundaries.

Assume the experience includes live event discovery before the event, reminders or notifications, joining an event when it starts, handling event state changes, and post-event availability where applicable. You do not need to design the streaming infrastructure itself, but you should define how product-facing services, clients, and data entities would coordinate to make the experience work safely and consistently.

The experience should consider:

- Core users and permissions: Kids profiles, parent profiles, account owners, co-viewing scenarios, and approval flows.

- Event lifecycle data: Scheduled, upcoming, live, delayed, ended, canceled, replay-available, and region-specific availability states.

- API needs: Discovery, event detail, eligibility checks, parental approval, reminders, notification preferences, join-live actions, and status updates.

- Data model entities: Live event, profile, maturity rating, household/account, reminder, entitlement, localization, device capability, and viewing session.

- Safety and compliance: Age ratings, parental controls, privacy for children, consent boundaries, and regional policy differences.

- Reliability and observability: Event state consistency, latency expectations, retries, idempotency, monitoring, analytics events, and failure handling.

- Product trade-offs: Real-time freshness versus caching, personalization versus simplicity, global localization versus launch speed, and parental control strictness versus ease of use.

The goal is to demonstrate how you would translate a family-oriented Live Events product workflow into clear technical requirements, APIs, and data structures that enable a safe, reliable, and scalable Netflix experience without over-designing beyond the intended scope.

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