The End of Video Coding?

In the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine issue November 2006 article “Future of Video Coding and Transmission” Prof. Edward Delp started by asking the panelists “Is video coding dead? Some feel that, with the higher coding efficiency of the H.264/MPEG-4 . . . perhaps there is not much more to do…

Enhancing the Netflix UI Experience with HDR

Some of you have probably heard about HDR, or High Dynamic Range, which can produce a higher level of brightness, a wider range of colors, and an increased level of detail and accuracy that empowers visual storytellers to deliver more impactful experiences for…

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…

Re-Architecting the Video Gatekeeper

This is the story about how the Content Setup Engineering team used Hollow, a Netflix OSS technology, to re-architect and simplify an essential component in our content pipeline — delivering a large amount of business value in the process. The Context Each movie and show on the Netflix service is carefully curated…

Evolving Container Security With Linux User Namespaces

As previously discussed on the Netflix Tech Blog, Titus is the Netflix container orchestration system. It runs a wide variety of workloads from various parts of the company — everything…

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…

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…

Trace Event, Chrome and More Profile Formats on FlameScope

Less than a year ago, FlameScope was released as a proof of concept for a new profile visualization. Since then, it helped us, and many other users, to easily find and fix performance issues, and allowed us to see patterns that we had never noticed before in our profiles. As…

Improving Experimentation Efficiency at Netflix with Meta Analysis and Optimal Stopping

From living rooms in Bogota, to morning commutes in Tokyo, to beaches in Los Angeles and dorms in Berlin, Netflix strives to bring joy to over 139 million members around the globe and connect people with stories they’ll love. Every bit of the customer…

How Netflix microservices tackle dataset pub-sub

Introduction In a microservice architecture such as Netflix’s, propagating datasets from a single source to multiple downstream destinations can be challenging. These datasets can represent anything from service configuration to the results of a batch job, are often needed in-memory to optimize access and must be updated as…

Netflix OSS and Spring Boot — Coming Full Circle

In 2007, Netflix started on a long road towards fully operating in the cloud. Much of Netflix’s backend and mid-tier applications are built using Java, and as part of this effort Netflix engineering built several cloud infrastructure libraries and systems — Ribbon for load balancing, Eureka for service discovery, and…

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix

Our learnings from adopting GraphQL

by Artem Shtatnov and Ravi Srinivas Ranganathan In an earlier blog post, we provided a high-level overview of some of the applications in the Marketing Technology team that we build to enable scale and intelligence in driving our global advertising, which reaches users on sites like The New York Times…

Ready for changes with Hexagonal Architecture

As the production of Netflix Originals grows each year, so does our need to build apps that enable efficiency throughout the entire creative process. Our wider Studio Engineering Organization has built numerous apps that help content progress from pitch (aka screenplay) to playback: ranging…

Detecting Performance Anomalies in External Firmware Deployments

Netflix has over 139M members streaming on more than half a billion devices spanning over 1,700 different types of devices from hundreds of brands. This diverse device ecosystem results in a high dimensionality feature space, often with sparse data, and can make identifying device performance issues challenging…

Announcing the Netflix Post Technology Alliance

You’re working on the next great show or film that will deliver to Netflix. You know Netflix has a high quality bar for its content and you want the delivery to go smoothly. Do you know if the tools you have invested in can…

Netflix Public Bug Bounty, 1 year later

As Netflix continues to create entertainment people love, the security team continues to keep our members, partners, and employees secure. The security research community has partnered with us to improve the security of the Netflix service for the past few years through our responsible…

How Data Inspires Building a Scalable, Resilient and Secure Cloud Infrastructure At Netflix

Netflix’s engineering culture is predicated on Freedom & Responsibility, the idea that everyone (and every team) at Netflix is entrusted with a core responsibility and they are free to operate with freedom to satisfy their mission. This…

Remote Workstations for the Discerning Artists

Netflix is poised to become the world’s most prolific producer of visual effects and original animated content. To meet that demand, we need to attract the world’s best artistic talent. Artists like to work at places where they can create groundbreaking entertainment instead of worrying about getting…

Scaling Revenue & Growth Tooling

This post shares how the Revenue & Growth Tools (RGT) team approaches creating full-stack tools for the teams that are the financial backbone of Netflix. Our primary partners are the teams of Revenue and Growth Engineering (RGE): Growth, Membership, Billing, Payments…

Engineering to Improve Marketing Effectiveness (Part 2) — Scaling Ad Creation and Management

In the first part of this series of blogs, we described our philosophy, motivations, and approach to blending ad technology into our marketing. In addition, we laid out some of the engineering undertakings to solve creative development and localization at scale. In this Part-2…

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…

Edgar: Solving Mysteries Faster with Observability

by Elizabeth Carretto Our Team — Kevin Lew, Maulik Pandey, Narayanan Arunachalam, Dustin Haffner, Andrei Ushakov, Seth Katz, Greg Burrell, Ram Vaithilingam, Mike Smith and Elizabeth Carretto Everyone loves Unsolved Mysteries. There’s always someone who seems like the surefire culprit. There’s a clear motive, the perfect opportunity, and an…

Optimized shot-based encodes for 4K: Now streaming!

Netflix has an ever-expanding collection of titles which customers can enjoy in 4K resolution with a suitable device and subscription plan. Netflix creates premium bitstreams for those titles in addition to the catalog-wide 8-bit stream profiles¹. Premium features comprise a…

Improving our video encodes for legacy devices

Netflix has been one of the pioneers of streaming video-on-demand content — we announced our intention to stream video over 13 years ago, in January 2007 — and have only increased both our device and content reach since then…