The technical product team of iQIYI
By upgrading to the third‑phase Interoperable Master Format, iQIYI has cut delivery time in half, enabling one film’s upload to cover two, while reducing subtitle edit time to 5% of the original, slashing storage by over a third, and supporting 4K‑HDR and immersive audio for faster, more flexible global distribution.
To achieve sub‑second start‑up for mobile video streaming, the iQIYI overseas project applies layered HTTPS optimizations—including DNS and certificate caching, ECDHE/X25519 key exchange, false start, lightweight cipher suites, ECDSA certificates, OCSP stapling, and session‑ID/ticket reuse—while transitioning toward TLS 1.3 0‑RTT and HTTP/3 QUIC for further latency reduction.
To prevent massive user loss from slow loads, iQIYI International overhauled its mobile app’s network stack—switching to HTTPDNS, enabling TCP Fast Open, upgrading to HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, compressing payloads with Brotli and WebP, using protobuf, caching, and fallback protocols—cut latency, reduced failures, and boosted video playback across Southeast Asian markets.
Strategy Engine 2.0 redesigns the original system by introducing fully configurable tags, modular management and matching services, business‑line data and traffic isolation, and performance optimizations such as parallel execution and circuit‑breakers, enabling real‑time, fine‑grained audience segmentation that scales across multiple business units.
The framework tags short videos by fusing text, image and audio‑video features through specialized extraction, classification, generative and retrieval modules, then ranking candidates with a multimodal BERT model, delivering accurate, business‑specific tags that boost recommendation, search and advertising.
iQIYI’s cpu‑share‑syncer daemon runs on every node, reads a pod’s iqiyi.com/cpu‑share annotation, updates the pod’s cpu.shares after disabling the Kubernetes CPU CFS quota, and lets high‑priority video‑production pods pre‑empt CPU from lower‑priority pods, significantly speeding task execution.
The paper describes iQIYI’s Content Platform Data Center (OLTP), a unified data hub that solves microservice data‑island problems by providing hundred‑billion‑scale storage, high‑QPS reads/writes, field‑level change notifications, final consistency between MongoDB and Elasticsearch, active‑active high availability, and a generic SDK, now serving 26 business lines with thousands of QPS and hundreds of millions of rows.
iQIYI’s virtual production platform recently demonstrated a 4K cinematic‑grade workflow by scanning, reconstructing, and rendering the massive “Bad Well” set in real time on LED walls, enabling multi‑camera capture, AR overlays, and reusable digital assets that cut production costs by about 30% while opening new metaverse applications.
The article explains how a content middle platform adopted serverless architecture—combining FaaS and BaaS—to build a cost‑effective, highly scalable image‑production service, illustrating self‑contained functions, synchronous pipelines, event‑driven processing, and workflow orchestration that reduce maintenance, accelerate deployment, and simplify operations.
iQIYI’s short‑video team solves the new‑video cold‑start problem by using a GAN that generates latent user features from video attributes and a discriminator to validate them, then matches these vectors to real users via cosine similarity, achieving double‑digit gains in exposure, CTR, and watch time.
