A method including: populating an encoding ladder with a subset of bitrate-resolution pairs, from a set of bitrate-resolution pairs, based on a distribution of audience bandwidths; receiving a first request for a first playback segment, at a first bitrate-resolution pair in a encoding ladder, in the video from a first device; in response to determining an absence of video segments, at the first bitrate-resolution pair and corresponding to the segment, in a first rendition cache: identifying a first set of mezzanine segments, in the video, corresponding to the first playback segment; assigning the first set of mezzanine segments to a set of workers for transcoding into a first set of video segments according to the first bitrate-resolution pair; storing the first set of video segments in the first rendition cache; and based on the first request, releasing the first set of video segments to the first device.