Netflix Live Origin is a custom-built server that sits between cloud live streaming pipelines and Open Connect, the company's Content Delivery Network. It acts as a quality control checkpoint that decides which video segments get delivered to millions of viewers worldwide.

When Netflix introduced live streaming, they needed a system that could handle real-time video delivery's unique challenges. Unlike Video on Demand, where content is prepared in advance, live streaming operates under strict time constraints. Every video segment must be encoded, packaged, and delivered to viewers within seconds.

The Live Origin operates as a multi-tenant microservice on Amazon EC2 instances. Netflix achieves reliability through redundant regional pipelines, running two independent encoding pipelines simultaneously in different cloud regions. They also adopted a manifest design with segment templates and constant 2-second segment duration, allowing the Origin to predict exactly when segments should be published.