Netflix Studio Engineering Overview

Netflix is revolutionizing the way a modern studio operates. Our mission in Studio Engineering is to build a unified, global, and digital studio that powers the effective production of amazing content. Studio Engineering at Netflix …

Auto Scaling Production Services on Titus

Over the past three years, Netflix has been investing in container technology. A large part of this investment has been around Titus, Netflix’s container management platform that was open sourced in April of 2018. Titus schedules application containers…

Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix

Notebooks have rapidly grown in popularity among data scientists to become the de facto standard for quick prototyping and exploratory analysis. At Netflix, we’re pushing the boundaries even further, reimagining what a notebook can be, who can use it, and…

Unbundling Data Science Workflows with Metaflow and AWS Step Functions

tl;dr Today, we are releasing a new job scheduler integration with AWS Step Functions. This integration allows the users of Metaflow to schedule their production workflows using a highly available, scalable, maintenance-free service, without…

Computational Causal Inference at Netflix

Every Netflix data scientist, whether their background is from biology, psychology, physics, economics, math, statistics, or biostatistics, has made meaningful contributions to the way Netflix analyzes causal effects. Scientists from these fields have made many advancements in causal effects research in the past few decades, spanning…

Introducing Netflix Timed Text Authoring Lineage

By: Bhanu Srikanth, Andy Swan, Casey Wilms, Patrick Pearson The Art of Dubbing and Subtitling Dubbing and subtitling are inherently creative processes. At Netflix, we strive to make shows as joyful to watch in every language as in the original language, whether a member watches with original or dubbed audio, closed captions…

Modernizing the Web Playback UI

Since 2013, the user experience of playing videos on the Netflix website has changed very little. During this period, teams at Netflix have rolled out amazing video playback features, but the visual design and user controls of the playback UI have remained the same. The visual design and user controls…

Making our Android Studio Apps Reactive with UI Components & Redux

Recently Netflix has started building mobile apps to bring technology and innovation to our Studio Physical Productions, the portion of the business responsible for producing our TV shows and movies. Our very first mobile app is called Prodicle and was…

Predictive CPU isolation of containers at Netflix

Noisy Neighbors We’ve all had noisy neighbors at one point in our life. Whether it’s at a cafe or through a wall of an apartment, it is always disruptive. The need for good manners in shared spaces turns out to be important not just for people, but for your Docker containers too. …

Lerner — using RL agents for test case scheduling

Introduction Netflix brings delightful customer experiences to homes on a variety of devices that continues to grow each day. Partners across the globe leverage Netflix device certification process on a continual basis to ensure that quality products and experiences are…

Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to our Android mobile app. AV1 is a high performance, royalty-free video codec that provides 20% improved compression efficiency over our VP9† encodes. AV1 is made…

Netflix SIRT releases Diffy: A Differencing Engine for Digital Forensics in the Cloud

Can you spot the difference? Hint: it’s not the bow tie. The Netflix Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) announces the release of Diffy under an Apache 2.0 license. Diffy is a triage tool to help digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) teams quickly identify compromised hosts on which to…

AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding

TL; DR We need an alternative to JPEG that a) is widely supported, b) has better compression efficiency and c) has a wider feature set. We believe AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) has the potential. Using the…

Introducing Dispatch

Netflix is pleased to announce the open-source release of our crisis management orchestration framework: Dispatch! Okay, but what is Dispatch? Put simply, Dispatch is: All of the ad-hoc things you’re doing to manage incidents today, done for you, and a bunch of other things you should’ve been doing, but have not had the time! Dispatch helps us effectively…

GraphQL Search Indexing

Almost a year ago we described our learnings from adopting GraphQL on the Netflix Marketing Tech team. We have a lot more to share since then! There are plenty of existing resources describing how to express a search query in GraphQL and paginate…

Python at Netflix

As many of us prepare to go to PyCon, we wanted to share a sampling of how Python is used at Netflix. We use Python through the full content lifecycle, from deciding which content to fund all…

Design Principles for Mathematical Engineering in Experimentation Platform at Netflix

At Netflix, we have data scientists coming from many backgrounds such as neuroscience, statistics and biostatistics, economics, and physics; each of these backgrounds has a meaningful contribution to how experiments should be analyzed. To unlock these innovations we…

HDMI — Scaling Netflix Certification

At Netflix, we take the task of preserving the creative vision of our content all the way to a subscriber TV screen very seriously. This significantly increases the scope of our application integration and certification processes for streaming devices like set-top-boxes (STBs) and…

Performance comparison of video coding standards: an adaptive streaming perspective

“This is my advice to people: Learn how to cook, try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun” — Julia Child (American chef, author, and television personality) At Netflix, we are continually refining the recipes we use to serve your favorite shows and movies…

How Netflix uses Druid for Real-time Insights to Ensure a High-Quality Experience

Ensuring a consistently great Netflix experience while continuously pushing innovative technology updates is no easy feat. How can we be confident that updates are not harming our users? And that we’re actually making measurable improvements when we intend to? Using real-time logs from playback devices as a…

Hawkins: Diving into the Reasoning Behind our Design System

by Hawkins team member Joshua Godi; with cover art from Martin Bekerman and additional imagery from Wiki Chaves Hawkins may be the name of a fictional town in Indiana, most widely known as the backdrop for one of Netflix’s most popular TV series “Stranger Things,” but the name is so…

Metacat: Making Big Data Discoverable and Meaningful at Netflix

Most large companies have numerous data sources with different data formats and large data volumes. These data stores are accessed and analyzed by many people throughout the enterprise. At Netflix, our data warehouse consists of a large number of data sets stored in Amazon S3…

Netflixにおける日本語字幕の導入

Netflixでは、2015年9月の日本における配信サービス開始時から日本語字幕を提供して …

How Our Paths Brought Us to Data and Netflix

by Julie Beckley & Chris Pham This Q&A provides insights into the diverse set of skills, projects, and culture within Data Science and Engineering (DSE) at Netflix through the eyes of two team members: Chris Pham and Julie Beckley. Photo from a team curling offsite — There’s us to the right! [Chris] Julie and I joined the Streaming DSE team at Netflix…

Applying Netflix DevOps Patterns to Windows

By Justin Phelps and Manuel Correa Customizing Windows images at Netflix was a manual, error-prone, and time consuming process. In this blog post, we describe how we improved the methodology, which technologies we leveraged, and how this has improved service deployment and consistency. Artisan Crafted Images In the Netflix…