Empowering the Visual Effects Community with the NetFX Platform

At Netflix, we want to entertain our global membership with series and films from around the world. In line with that, we’re excited to announce NetFX, a cloud-based platform that will make it easier for…

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…

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…

DBLog: A Generic Change-Data-Capture Framework

Overview Change-Data-Capture (CDC) allows capturing committed changes from a database in real-time and propagating those changes to downstream consumers [1][2]. CDC is becoming increasingly popular for use cases that require keeping multiple heterogeneous datastores in sync (like MySQL and ElasticSearch) and addresses challenges that exist with traditional…

Netflix at Spark+AI Summit 2018

A glimpse at Spark usage for Netflix Recommendations Apache Spark has been an immensely popular big data platform for distributed computing. Netflix has been using Spark extensively for various batch and stream-processed workloads. A substantial list of use cases for Spark computation come from the various applications in the domain of content recommendations and personalization…

Growth Engineering at Netflix- Creating a Scalable Offers Platform

Background Netflix has been offering streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) for over 10 years. Throughout that time we’ve primarily relied on 3 plans (Basic, Standard, & Premium), combined with the 30-day free trial to drive global customer acquisition. The world has changed a lot in this time. Competition for people’s…

Growth Engineering at Netflix — Accelerating Innovation

Millions of people visit Netflix every day. Many of them are already Netflix members, looking to enjoy their favorite movies and TV shows, and we work hard to ensure they have a great experience. Others are not yet members, and are looking to better understand our service…

ML Platform Meetup: Infra for Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning

Infrastructure for Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning — theme of the ML Platform meetup hosted at Netflix, Los Gatos on Sep 12, 2019. Contextual and Multi-armed Bandits enable faster and adaptive alternatives to traditional A/B Testing. They enable rapid learning and better decision-making for product rollouts. Broadly speaking, these approaches…

Engineering a Studio Quality Experience With High-Quality Audio at Netflix

Remember the epic opening sequence of Stranger Things 2? The thrill of that car chase through Pittsburgh not only introduced a whole new set of mysteries, but it returned…

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…

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…

Beyond REST

by Dane Avilla The entertainment industry has struggled with COVID-19 restrictions impacting productions around the globe. Since early 2020, Netflix has been iteratively developing systems to provide internal stakeholders and business leaders with up-to-date tools and dashboards with the latest information on the pandemic. These software solutions allow executive leadership…

Netflix Studio Hack Day — May 2019

Hack Days are a big deal at Netflix. They’re a chance to bring together employees from all our different disciplines to explore new ideas and experiment with emerging technologies. For the most recent hack day, we channeled our creative energy towards…

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix

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…

Production Media Management: Transforming Media Workflows by leveraging the Cloud

In this post, we will share a behind-the-scenes look at how Netflix delivers technology and infrastructure to help production…

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…

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…

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…

Bringing 4K and HDR to Anime at Netflix with Sol Levante

Some might dismiss them as simple cartoons, but anime’s diverse and fantastical stories, vibrant style, and delicate lines are an art form that has evolved and grown in popularity, variety and sophistication over the last fifty years. From its likely roots in colorful painted…

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…

Engineering to Improve Marketing Effectiveness (Part 3) — Scaling Paid Media campaigns

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…

Netflix Cloud Security: Detecting Credential Compromise in AWS

Credential compromise is an important concern for anyone operating in the cloud. The problem becomes more obvious over time, as organizations continue to adopt cloud resources as part of their infrastructure without maintaining an accompanying capability to observe and react to these compromises…

How Netflix brings safer and faster streaming experience to the living room on crowded networks…

At Netflix, we are obsessed with the best streaming experiences. We want playback to start instantly and to never stop unexpectedly in any network environment. We are also committed to protecting users’ privacy and service security without sacrificing any part of the playback experience. To achieve that…