Page Simulator

At Netflix, we spend a lot of effort to make it easy for our members to find content they will love. To make this happen, we personalize many aspects of our service, including…

Edge Authentication and Token-Agnostic Identity Propagation

As most developers can attest, dealing with security protocols and identity tokens, as well as user and device authentication, can be challenging. Imagine having multiple protocols, multiple tokens, 200M+ users…

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 at MIT CODE 2020

In November, Netflix was a proud sponsor of the 2020 Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE), hosted by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. As well as providing sponsorship, Netflix data scientists were active participants, with three contributions. Eskil Forsell and colleagues presented a poster describing Success stories…

MezzFS — Mounting object storage in Netflix’s media processing platform

MezzFS (short for “Mezzanine File System”) is a tool we’ve developed at Netflix that mounts cloud objects as local files via FUSE. It’s used extensively in our media processing platform, which includes services like Archer and runs features like…

Spinnaker Sets Sail to the Continuous Delivery Foundation

Since releasing Spinnaker to the open source community in 2015, the platform has flourished with the addition of new cloud providers, triggers, pipeline stages, and much more. Myriad new features, improvements, and innovations have been added by an ever growing, actively engaged community. Each new innovation has…

Open-sourcing Polynote: an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

We are pleased to announce the open-source launch of Polynote: a new, polyglot notebook with first-class Scala support, Apache Spark integration, multi-language interoperability including Scala, Python, and SQL, as-you-type autocomplete, and more. Polynote provides data scientists and machine learning researchers with a notebook environment…

Building a Rule-Based Platform to Manage Netflix Membership SKUs at Scale

At Netflix, we aspire to entertain the world. From mailing DVDs in the US to a global streaming service with over 200 million subscribers across 190 countries, we have come a long way. For the longest time, Netflix had three plans (basic/standard/premium)…

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…

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…

Optimizing the Aural Experience on Android Devices with xHE-AAC

Introduction At Netflix, we are passionate about delivering great audio to our members. We began streaming 5.1 channel surround sound in 2010, Dolby Atmos in 2017, and adaptive bitrate audio in 2019. Continuing in this tradition, we are proud to announce that Netflix now streams…

Bringing Rich Experiences to Memory-constrained TV Devices

Netflix has over 148M paid members streaming on more than half a billion devices spanning over 1,900 different types. In the TV space alone, there are hundreds of device types that run the Netflix app. We need to support the same rich Netflix…

SVT-AV1: an open-source AV1 encoder and decoder

SVT-AV1 is an open-source AV1 codec implementation hosted on GitHub https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/ under a BSD + patent license. As mentioned in our earlier blog post, Intel and Netflix have been collaborating on the SVT-AV1 encoder and decoder framework since August 2018. The teams have been working closely on SVT-AV1 development, discussing…

How Netflix uses eBPF flow logs at scale for network insight

Netflix has developed a network observability sidecar called Flow Exporter that uses eBPF tracepoints to capture TCP flows at near real time. At much less than 1% of CPU and memory on the instance, this highly performant sidecar provides…

Growth Engineering at Netflix — Automated Imagery Generation

Background There’s a good chance you’ve probably visited the Netflix homepage. In the Growth Engineering team, we refer to this as the top of the signup funnel. For more background on the signup funnel and Growth Engineering’s role in the signup funnel, please read our initial post on…

Netflix at AWS re:Invent 2019

AWS re:Invent is a couple weeks away and our engineers & leaders are thrilled to be in attendance yet again this year! Please stop by our “Living Room” for an opportunity to connect or reconnect with Netflixers. We’ve compiled our speaking events below so you know…

Delta: A Data Synchronization and Enrichment Platform

Andreas Andreakis, Falguni Jhaveri, Ioannis Papapanagiotou, Mark Cho, Poorna Reddy, Tongliang Liu Overview It is a commonly observed pattern for applications to utilize multiple datastores where each is used to serve a specific need such as storing the canonical form of data (MySQL etc.), providing advanced search capabilities (ElasticSearch etc.), caching…

Streaming Video Experimentation at Netflix: Visualizing Practical and Statistical Significance

Streaming video experimentation at Netflix seeks to optimize the Quality of Experience (QoE for short) of the videos we stream to our 130 million members around the world. To measure QoE, we look at a wide variety of metrics for each playback session, including play delay; the…

Telltale: Netflix Application Monitoring Simplified

Our Telltale Vision An alert fires and you get paged in the middle of the night. A metric crossed a threshold. You’re half awake and wondering, “Is there really a problem or is this just an alert…

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…

Data Engineers of Netflix — Interview with Dhevi Rajendran

This post is part of our “Data Engineers of Netflix” interview series, where our very own data engineers talk about their journeys to Data Engineering @ Netflix. Dhevi Rajendran is a Data Engineer on the Growth Data Science and Engineering team. Dhevi joined Netflix in July 2020 and is one…

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…

Evolution of Application Data Caching : From RAM to SSD

Part 2: Scheduling Notebooks at Netflix

At Netflix we’ve put substantial effort into adopting notebooks as an integrated development platform. The idea started as a discussion of what development and collaboration interfaces might look like in the future. It evolved into a strategic bet on notebooks, both as…

Open-Sourcing Metaflow, a Human-Centric Framework for Data Science

tl;dr Metaflow is now open-source! Get started at metaflow.org. Netflix applies data science to hundreds of use cases across the company, including optimizing content delivery and video encoding. Data scientists at Netflix relish our culture that…