Full database schema for a Netflix-like video streaming platform with content management, multi-profile support, subscription billing, watch history, ratings, recommendations engine, and download features.
The distinction that shapes this schema is between an account and a viewer. users pays and signs in; profiles is who is watching. Everything personal — history, watchlist, ratings, downloads — hangs off a profile, which is why one household's recommendations do not bleed into another's.
The catalogue is one table with a type, not two. content holds both films and series, and seasons and episodes hang off it only when the type calls for them. A film is a content row with no seasons; a series is a content row with them. Searching, rating and adding to a watchlist all work on content and never need to know which kind it is.
watch_history points at both content and episode, and that is what makes resume work for a series. The content_id answers 'what are you watching', the episode_id answers 'where', and progress_seconds answers 'how far'.
The alternative is a films table and a series table, which doubles every catalogue query — search, genres, watchlist, ratings all become unions. A type column plus seasons and episodes that only series use keeps the catalogue one thing. The cost is that duration_minutes on content means nothing for a series, which is a nullable column against a duplicated query surface.
If history and ratings lived on users, a shared household would get one blended taste profile and one resume point. Putting them on profiles is the entire point of profiles existing. The consequence is that deleting a profile deletes its history, which is what people expect when they delete a profile.
content_cast holds role, character_name and billing_order rather than separate actors and directors tables. The same person appears in different capacities on different titles, so the capacity is a property of the credit. billing_order is stored because the order on a title page is an editorial decision, not alphabetical.
max_profiles, max_streams and video_quality sit on subscription_plans rather than being hardcoded. Changing what a tier includes is then a row update, and a subscription that points at the old plan row keeps the old terms until it is moved.