Netflix hasn’t been coy about its plans to take over Hollywood. The company has already said it could spend up to $8 billion on content this year alone. But, for all the awards House of Cards and Icarus rack up, one of the reasons Netflix has tasted success so rapidly is its streaming technology. That’s an area it has been perfecting in-house since 2010, when it became more than a simple mail-order DVD rental shop.
For Netflix, the tech is just as important as the storytelling. Regardless of how many shows or movies Netflix produces, it needs to ensure that its 118 million subscribers can watch them without issue — no matter where they are in the world, which smartphone they own or how fast their internet is. Netflix even recently re-encoded its entire catalog (said to be around 6,000 titles) to produce the best possible picture using the smallest amount of bandwidth, which was made possible by an AI technology it developed called Dynamic Optimizer.
Source: Netflix’s real advantage is that it’s a tech company first