By Tom Richards, Carenina Garcia Motion, and Leslie Posada

Hack Day at Netflix is an opportunity to build and show off a feature, tool, or quirky app. The goal is simple: experiment with new ideas/technologies, engage with colleagues across different disciplines, and have fun!

We know even the silliest idea can spur something more.

The most important value of our Hack Days is that they support a culture of innovation. We believe in this work, even if it never ships, and enjoy sharing the creativity and thought put into these ideas.

Below, you can find videos made by the hackers of some of our favorite hacks from this event.

Nostalgiflix

Nostalgiflix is a chrome extension that transforms your Netflix web browser into an interactive TV time machine covering three decades (80’s, 90’s, and 00’s.) By dragging the UI slider around, you can view titles originally released within the selected year ( based on their historic box office and episode air dates.) More importantly you can also adjust the video filters in real-time to creatively downgrade the viewing experience, further enhancing the nostalgic effect. We think this feature could encourage our users to watch more of our older content while having fun reliving those moments of cinematic history.

By Joey Cato, Nazanin Delam, Sumana Mohan, Jeff Shi, Lily Dwyer, and Vishal Mishra

World of CS

This is a real time visualization of all contacts around the world. Each square on the map represent one of our global contact centers, spanning from Salt Lake City to Brazil, India, and Japan. The heatmap in the background is a historical trend of calls over the last hour, showing which countries are currently most active in contacting customer service. Every line you see is a live customer contact — starting at the customer’s country and ending at the contact center it was routed to. Four different types of contacts are represented in this visualization, white for regular phone calls, light blue for chats, green for calls that are initiated through our mobile apps on android and iOS, and red for contacts which are escalated from one representative to another.

By Sushruth Puttaswamy and Adam Krasny

Bird Box — Automatic AD

Audio Descriptive tracks provide descriptive narration in addition to dialog, helping visually impaired and blind members enjoy our shows. For the Hack Day project, we explored using recent research¹ to automatically generate descriptions, then used our own internal authoring tools to refine the output. We then used synthetic audio and automated mixing techniques to deliver a final audio description track.

By Adam Wang, Andy Swan, Raja Senapati, Shilpa Jois, Anjali Chablani, Deepa Krishnan, Vidya Sundaram, and Casey Wilms

You can also check out highlights from our past events: May 2019, November 2018, March 2018, August 2017, January 2017, May 2016, November 2015, March 2015, February 2014 & August 2014.

Thanks to all the teams who put together a great round of hacks in 24 hours

Footnotes

1. Weakly Supervised Dense Event Captioning in Videos
   Duan, Xuguang and Huang, Wenbing and Gan, Chuang and Wang, Jingdong and Zhu, Wenwu and Huang, Junzhou
   Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 Curran Associates, Inc.. p. 3062–3072. 2018

Netflix Hack Day — November 2019 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Tom Richards, Carenina Garcia Motion, and Marlee Tart

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 our studio efforts. The goal remained the same: team up with new colleagues and have fun while learning, creating, and experimenting. We know even the silliest idea can spur something more.

The most important value of hack days is that they support a culture of innovation. We believe in this work, even if it never ships, and love to share the creativity and thought put into these ideas.

Below, you can find videos made by the hackers of some of our favorite hacks from this event.

Project Rumble Pak

You’re watching your favorite episode of Voltron when, after a suspenseful pause, there’s a huge explosion — and your phone starts to vibrate in your hands.

The Project Rumble Pak hack day project explores how haptics can enhance the content you’re watching. With every explosion, sword clank, and laser blast, you get force feedback to amp up the excitement.

For this project, we synchronized Netflix content with haptic effects using Immersion Corporation technology.

By Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker

The Voice of Netflix

Introducing The Voice of Netflix. We trained a neural net to spot words in Netflix content and reassemble them into new sentences on demand. For our stage demonstration, we hooked this up to a speech recognition engine to respond to our verbal questions in the voice of Netflix’s favorite characters. Try it out yourself at blogofsomeguy.com/v!

By Guy Cirino and Carenina Garcia Motion

TerraVision

TerraVision re-envisions the creative process and revolutionizes the way our filmmakers can search and discover filming locations. Filmmakers can drop a photo of a look they like into an interface and find the closest visual matches from our centralized library of locations photos. We are using a computer vision model trained to recognize places to build reverse image search functionality. The model converts each image into a small dimensional vector, and the matches are obtained by computing the nearest neighbors of the query.

By Noessa Higa, Ben Klein, Jonathan Huang, Tyler Childs, Tie Zhong, and Kenna Hasson

Get Out!

Have you ever found yourself needing to give the Evil Eye™ to colleagues who are hogging your conference room after their meeting has ended?

Our hack is a simple web application that allows employees to select a Netflix meeting room anywhere in the world, and press a button to kick people out of their meeting room if they have overstayed their meeting. First, the app looks up calendar events associated with the room and finds the latest meeting in the room that should have already ended. It then automatically calls in to that meeting and plays walk-off music similar to the Oscar’s to not-so-subtly encourage your colleagues to Get Out! We built this hack using Java (Springboot framework), the Google OAuth and Calendar APIs (for finding rooms) and Twilio API (for calling into the meeting), and deployed it on AWS.

By Abi Seshadri and Rachel Rivera

You can also check out highlights from our past events: November 2018, March 2018, August 2017, January 2017, May 2016, November 2015, March 2015, February 2014 & August 2014.

Thanks to all the teams who put together a great round of hacks in 24 hours.

Netflix Studio Hack Day — May 2019 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Tom Richards, Carenina Motion, Ruslan Meshenberg, Leslie Posada, and Kaely Coon

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.

This Hack Day, there were hacks that ranged from making improvements to the product, to enhancing our internal tools, to just having some fun. We know even the silliest idea can spur something more.

Below, you can find videos made by the hackers of some of our favorite hacks from this event. You can also check out highlights from our past events: March 2018, August 2017, January 2017, May 2016, November 2015, March 2015, February 2014 & August 2014.

The most important value of our Hack Days is that they support a culture of innovation. We believe in this work, even if it never makes it in the product, and we love to share the creativity and thought put into these ideas.

Major credit and thanks goes to all the teams who put together a great round of hacks in 24 hours.

Jump to Shark

Jump to Shark allows you to skip right to the best (and bloodiest) bits and pieces of Sharknado.

By Juliano Moraes and Shivaun Robinson

Eye Nav

Apple’s ARKit is a lot of fun to play with, and has enabled much-loved features like Animoji. We care a lot about Accessibility, so we’re eager to try a hack that would allow people to navigate the iOS app just by moving their eyes. The same technology that enables Face ID is great for accurately tracking eye position and facial expression. We used eye tracking to move the pointer around the screen, and measured the time spent on the same area to trigger the equivalent of a tap. We then used a facial gesture (tongue sticking out) to dismiss a screen. We’re hopeful that this kind of technology will become a part of mainstream Accessibility APIs in the future.

By Ben Hands, John Fox, and Steve Henderson

Lunch Bot

Eating lunch together is a great way to meet new people and catch up with our coworkers, but sometimes we’re too busy to make the effort and end up eating lunch at our desks. To solve this problem, I created LunchBot. Every morning, LunchBot invites a random group of coworkers to eat lunch together — and checks their calendars to make sure they’re all free at the same time.

By Ben Morris

Netflix Hack Day — Fall 2018 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, Leslie Posada, and Tom Richards

We hosted another great Hack Day event a week ago at Netflix headquarters. Hack Day is a way for our product development team to take a break from everyday work, have fun, experiment with new technologies, and collaborate with new people.

Each Hack Day, we see a wide range of ideas on how to improve the product and internal tools as well as some that are just meant to be fun. This event was no different. We’ve embedded videos below, produced by the hackers, to some of our favorites. You can also see more hacks from several of our past events: May 2016, November 2015, March 2015, Feb. 2014 & Aug. 2014:

• Netflix Hack Day — Spring 2016
• Netflix Hack Day — Autumn 2015
• Netflix Hack Day — Winter 2015
• Netflix Hack Day
• Netflix Hack Day — Summer 2014

While we’re excited about the creativity and thought put into these hacks, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day. We are posting them here publicly to share the spirit of the event and our culture of innovation.

Thanks again to the hackers who, in just 24 hours, assembled really innovative hacks.

Stranger Bling

MDAS (Mobile Demogorgon Alerting System) a.k.a. Ugly Christmas Sweater

LEDs soldered to a Stranger Things sweater, controlled wirelessly with an Arduino, spelling out messages from the Upside Down!

By Francis Brennan, Michael James

MindFlix

Navigate and control Netflix with your mind (with help from a Muse headband).

By Ben Hands, Sagar Patil, Steve Henderson, Andy Law

Netflix for Good

After watching socially conscious titles on Netflix, Netflix for Good allows users to donate to related and well known organizations from inside the Netflix app.

By David Zelniker, Jwalant Shah, Sudarshan Lamkhede

Stranger Games

Stranger Things re-imagined as a home console video game collection created back in 1983, but with a twist.

By Joey Cato

Picture in Picture

See what other profiles on your account are watching via picture in picture.

By Matthew Kelly

Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on January 30, 2017.

Netflix Hack Day — Winter 2017 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, and Leslie Posada

Keeping with our roughly six-month cadence, Netflix recently hosted another fantastic Hack Day event. As was the case with our past installments, Hack Day is a way for our product development staff to take a break from everyday work to have fun, experiment with new technologies, collaborate with new people, and to generally be creative.

This time, we were lucky to have a team of Netflixers emerge to hack together a documentary video of the event. The following provides a peek into how the event operates:

We had an excellent turnout, including over 200 engineers and designers working on more than 80 hacks. The hacks themselves ranged from product ideas to internal tools to improvements in our recruiting process. We’ve embedded videos below, produced by the hackers, to some of our favorites. You can also see more hacks from several of our past events: November 2015, March 2015, Feb. 2014 & Aug. 2014:

• Netflix Hack Day — Autumn 2015
• Netflix Hack Day — Winter 2015
• Netflix Hack Day
• Netflix Hack Day — Summer 2014

As always, while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day. We are posting them here publicly to simply share the spirit of the event and our culture of innovation.

Thanks to all of the hackers for putting together some incredible work!

Netflix Zone

An alternate Netflix viewing experience created for the HTC Vive (VR). You just crossed over into…the Netflix Zone.

By Joey Cato, Adnan Abbas and Marco Caldeira

Spinnacraft

Integration of our open-source continuous delivery platform, Spinnaker, with Minecraft. Enough said.

By Daniel Reynaud, Andrea Guzzo, Ed Barker and Ed Bukoski

Tetris

Wish your recently watched row did not fall down from the top of your row list? Want to add other rows that we are not displaying to you yet? Presenting a desktop Netflix experience with drag and drop repositionable rows, pinned rows, and add/remove rows.

By Sanjit Bhattacharjee, Andy Chu, Shruti Nargundkar and Stephen Walz

Family Catch-up Viewing

See what your other profiles are watching in the player so you can know exactly where they left off in the episode. Now there’s no excuse to (accidentally) watch ahead!

By Lyle Troxell

QuietCast

You want to watch Marvel’s Daredevil on your Cast TV or Chromecast, but you just put your kid to bed in the next room. No problem, you plug in your headphones on your android tablet and cast the show. The audio plays from your phone while the cast target plays the video in silence.

By Kevin Morris, Baskar Odayarkoil and Shaomei Chen

Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on May 24, 2016.

Netflix Hack Day — Spring 2016 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, Matt McCarthy, and Leslie Posada

Last week, we hosted our latest installment of Netflix Hack Day. As always, Hack Day is a way for our product development staff to get away from everyday work, to have fun, experiment, collaborate, and be creative.

The following video is an inside look at what our Hack Day event looks like:

This time, we had 75 hacks that were produced by about 200 engineers and designers (and even some from the legal team!). We’ve embedded some of our favorites below. You can also see some of our past hacks in our posts for March 2015, Feb. 2014 & Aug. 2014:

• Netflix Hack Day — Winter 2015
• Netflix Hack Day
• Netflix Hack Day — Summer 2014

While we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day. We are posting them here publicly to simply share the spirit of the event.

Thanks to all of the hackers for putting together some incredible work in just 24 hours!

Netflix VHF

Watch Netflix on your Philco Predicta, the TV of tomorrow! We converted a 1950’s era TV into a smart TV that runs Netflix.

Narcos: Plata o Plomo Video Game

A fun game based on the Netflix original series, Narcos.

Stream Possible

Netflix TV experience over a 3G cell connection for the non-broadband rich parts of the world.

Ok Netflix

Ok Netflix can find the exact scene in a movie or episode from listening to the dialog that comes from that scene. Speak the dialog into Ok Netflix and Ok Netflix will do the rest, starting the right title in the right location.

Smart Channels

A way to watch themed collections of content that are personalized and also autoplay like serialized content.

And here are some pictures taken during the event.

Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on November 9, 2015.

Netflix Hack Day — Autumn 2015 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, Matt McCarthy, and Leslie Posada

Last week, we hosted the latest Netflix Hack Day. Hack Day is a way for our product development teams to get away from everyday work. It’s a fun, experimental, collaborative, and creative outlet.

This time, we had about 70 hacks that were produced by more than 150 engineers and designers. We shared a few examples below to give you a taste, and you can see some of our past hacks in our posts for Feb. 2014 & Aug. 2014:

• Netflix Hack Day
• Netflix Hack Day — Summer 2014

Note that while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day. We are surfacing them here publicly to share the spirit of the event.

Thanks to all of the hackers for putting together some incredible work in just 24 hours. If you’re interested in being a part of our next Hack Day, let us know by checking out our jobs site!

Netflix Earth

Netflix Earth is an animated 3D globe showing real-time global playback activity.

by Jeff Butsch and Seth Katz

BEEP (Binge Encouragement and Enforcement Platform)

BEEP actively and abrasively encourages users to continue watching Netflix when their attention starts to stray.

by Ben Hagen

darNES

In a world… where devices proliferate… darNES digs back in time to provide Netflix access to the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

by Guy Cirino, Alex Wolfe, and Carenina Motion

Say Whaaat!!!

Say Whaaat!!! provides a more convenient way to to catch missed dialogue as you watch Netflix by displaying subtitles when you pause playback. It also provides the ability to navigate a film’s timeline, caption by caption.

by Joey Cato and Adnan Abbas

Net the Netflix Cheats

Don’t let your partners watch when you aren’t around. Net the Netflix Cheats requires dual PIN access to watch titles that you and your partner have agreed to watch together.

by Kedar Sadekar and Sathish Sridharan

And here are some pictures taken during the event.

Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on March 9, 2015.

Netflix Hack Day — Winter 2015 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, Matt McCarthy, and Leslie Posada

Hack Day is a tradition at Netflix, as it is for many Silicon Valley companies. It is a great way to get away from everyday work and to provide a fun, experimental, collaborative and creative outlet for our product development and technical teams.

Similar to our Hack Day in February, we saw some really incredible ideas and implementations in our latest iteration last week. If something interesting and useful comes from Hack Day, that is great, but the real motivation is fun and collaboration. With that spirit in mind, we had over 150 people code from Thursday morning to Friday morning, yielding more than 50 “hacks.”

The teams produced hacks covering a wide array of areas, including development productivity, internal insights tools, quirky and fun mashups, and of course a breadth of product-related feature ideas. All hackers then presented and the audience of Netflix employees rated each hack on a 5-star scale to determine our seven category winners and a “People’s Choice Award.”

Below are some examples of some of the hacks to give you a taste of what we saw this time around. We should note that, while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or otherwise be used beyond Hack Day. We are surfacing them here publicly to share the spirit of the Netflix Hack Day.

And thanks to all of the hackers for putting together some incredible work in just 24 hours! If you are interested in being a part of our next Hack Day, let us know by checking out our jobs site!

Netflix Hue

Use Philips ‘smart’ lightbulbs to make your room’s ambient lighting match the titles that you are browsing and watching.

By Evan Browning, Bogdan Ciuca

Nerdflix

Text and console-based Netflix UI.

By Sanjit Bhattacharjee

Oculix

A 3D room version of our UI for the Oculus Rift, complete with gesture support.

By Ian McKay, Steve McGuire, Rachel Nordman, Kris Range, Alex Bustin, M. Frank Emanuel

Netflix Mini

Chrome extension that allows for multi-task watching in a mini screen.

By Adam Butterworth, Paul Anastasopoulos and Art Burov

Dropflix

Bringing actions that are currently only accessible via Display Pages into the Home & Browse UI.

By Ben Johnson, David Sutton

Circle of Life

Home page shows an alternate Netflix UI experience based on a network graph of titles.

By Sanjit Bhattacharjee

And here are some pictures taken during the event.

See Also:

Netflix Hack Day

Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on August 20, 2014.

Netflix Hack Day — Summer 2014 was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, Matt McCarthy and Leslie Posada

At Netflix, we pride ourselves in creating a culture of innovation and experimentation. We are constantly running A/B tests on virtually every enhancement to the Netflix experience. There are other ways in which we instill this culture within Netflix, including internal events such as Netflix Hack Day, which was held last week. For Hack Day, our primary goal is to provide a fun, experimental, and creative outlet for our engineers. If something interesting and potentially useful comes from it, that is fine, but the real motivation is fun. With that spirit in mind, most teams started hacking on Thursday morning, hacked through the night, and they wrapped up by Friday morning to present a demo to their peers.

It is not unusual for us to see a lot of really good ideas come from Hack Day, but last week we saw some really spectacular work. The hackers generated a wide range of ideas on just about anything, including ideas to improve developer productivity, ways to help troubleshooting, funky data visualizations, and of course a diversity of product feature ideas. These ideas get categorized, then to determine the winner for each category the audience of Netflix employees rated each hack, in true Netflix fashion, on a 5-star scale. The following are some examples of our favorite hacks and/or videos to give you a taste. Most of these hacks and videos were conceived of and produced in about 24 hours. We should also note that, while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or be used beyond Hack Day. We are surfacing them here publicly to share the spirit of the Netflix Hack Day.

Netflix Beam

by Sassda Chap

Radial

by Jia Pu, Aaron Tull, George Campbell

Custom Playlists

by Marco Vinicius Caldiera, Ian Kirk, Adam Excelsior Butterworth, Glenn Cho

Sleep Tracking with Fitbit

by Sam Horner, Rachel Nordman, Arlene Aficial, Sam Park, Bogdan Ciuca

Pin Protected Profiles

by Mike Kim, Dianne Marsh, Nick Ryabov

Thanks to all of the hackers and we look forward to the next one. If you are interested in being a part of our next Hack Day, let us know!

Also, we will be hosting our next Open Source meetup at Netflix HQ in Los Gatos on March 12th at 6:30pm. If you are interested, please sign up while there are still slots.

Originally published at techblog.netflix.com on February 27, 2014.

Netflix Hack Day was originally published in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.