Techniques disclosed herein include systems and methods that provide a workflow-based session manager or workflow engine for a content delivery system, such as for delivering video-on-demand, streaming audio, streaming video, etc. Such techniques increase velocity and flexibility of deploying new features and services in a video delivery system. Techniques include a session management model provides a service-oriented and workflow-based approach. As a service-oriented approach, each functional session management step can be represented as a business service. As a workflow-based solution, a sequence of steps to be performed can be defined as data, rather than being hard-coded inside an application. Defined as data, steps (nodes, tasks) can then be created and changed using a graphical editor. New services can be added by defining actions for the new service, and adding a node to a given session management workflow sequence. Techniques include a workflow engine that initiates session management in realtime.