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 workflow designed for families, where parents can discover, evaluate, schedule, and manage live programming that may be appropriate for kids, while children interact with the experience through age-appropriate profiles and devices. The workflow may span pre-event discovery, parental approval, reminders, live entry, playback constraints, and post-event availability.

Your task is to define the API and data model that could support this experience across Netflix clients, backend services, content systems, personalization, parental controls, and live streaming infrastructure. The focus is not on designing the visual UI, but on translating the product workflow into reliable technical requirements, data entities, API contracts, state transitions, and platform constraints.

Assume this is a global entertainment product with multiple kids’ age bands, localized content rules, household-level subscriptions, child profiles, parent profiles, live-event rights windows, and high expectations for streaming quality and safety. The system should handle both scheduled live events and operational realities such as delays, cancellations, regional restrictions, device differences, and moderation/safety concerns.

The experience should consider:

- Core users and permissions: parent account holders, child profiles, family households, and how approval or visibility rules differ by role.

- Live event lifecycle: creation, scheduling, publishing, reminders, event start, live playback, pause/seek limitations, event end, replay, cancellation, or delay states.

- Data model needs: event metadata, age ratings, localization, regional availability, rights windows, profile eligibility, parental-control settings, notification preferences, and watch state.

- API surfaces: client-facing APIs, parent-control APIs, event-discovery APIs, notification/reminder APIs, playback authorization, and internal content-operations dependencies.

- Reliability and scale: traffic spikes before and during live events, fallback behavior, latency expectations, idempotency, caching, and graceful degradation.

- Privacy, safety, and compliance: children’s data handling, consent, profile separation, auditability, regional child-safety requirements, and minimizing unnecessary data exposure.

- Observability and rollout: instrumentation, event-state monitoring, error tracking, experimentation, staged launch, rollback paths, and operational alerts.

The goal is to articulate a technically sound product design that enables a safe, parent-managed Live Events experience for kids while preserving Netflix-quality discovery, personalization, playback reliability, and global scalability.