This article was published on March 10, 2015

A Netflix hack day produced some amazing experiments that we want right now


A Netflix hack day produced some amazing experiments that we want right now

Netflix regularly holds internal hack days that consistently produce amazing results. Last year, the company showed off a hack that paused Netflix when your Fitbit detected you’d fallen asleep and custom playlists.

This time around, Netflix has one-upped itself. There’s a bunch of great new ideas, like the project below that lets you rewind a movie or TV show line by line. If we could have this feature tomorrow that’d be great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDOlyTA1jRA

Another hack stops your friend/partner/housemate from watching the TV show you’ve been following without you. It requires you both to enter a personal PIN number to watch the next episode so there’s no cheating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyW8UU5ddq4

Another hack, makes sure you’re focusing on watching your show by using your webcam to detect when you’re looking away and making a loud noise (BEEP) to get your attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEiNTunIo8c

Finally, a project that visualizes Netflix activity on top of Google Earth show’s which cities are binging the most.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdgdu2HVnzY

There’s also this incredible one that got House of Cards playing on a NES.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yn-rNdYZAY

Netflix previously said that its hack days are not indicative of what features may come to its product in the future, but I sure would appreciate most of these.

➤ Netflix Open Source [YouTube]

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