By Budhaditya Das, Wallace Wang, and Scott Yao

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) with a single 30-day free trial offer at signup. As we expand offerings rapidly across the globe, our ideas and strategies around plans and offers are evolving as well. For example, the mobile plan launch in India and Southeast Asia was a huge success. …

by Hawkins team member Joshua Godi; with art contributions by Wiki Chaves

Hawkins may be the name of a fictional town in Indiana, most widely known as the backdrop for one of Netflix’s most popular TV series “Stranger Things,” but the name is so much more. Hawkins is the namesake that established the basis for a design system used across the Netflix Studio ecosystem.

Have you ever used a suite of applications that had an inconsistent user experience? It can be a nightmare to work efficiently. The learning curve can be immense for each and every application in the suite…

by AIM Team Members Karen Casella, Travis Nelson, Sunny Singh; with prior art and contributions by Justin Ryan, Satyajit Thadeshwar

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, and thousands of device types, and the problem can explode in scope. A few years ago, we decided to address this complexity by spinning up a new initiative, and eventually a new team, to move the complex handling of user and device authentication, and various security protocols and tokens, to…

by Eric Eiswerth

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 leisure time has increased, the device ecosystem has grown phenomenally, and consumers want to watch premium content whenever they want, wherever they are, and on whatever device they prefer. We need to be constantly adapting and innovating as a result of this change.

The Growth Engineering team is responsible for…

By Paul Bakker and Kavitha Srinivasan, Images by David Simmer, Edited by Greg Burrell

Netflix has developed a Domain Graph Service (DGS) framework and it is now open source. The DGS framework simplifies the implementation of GraphQL, both for standalone and federated GraphQL services. Our framework is battle-hardened by our use at scale.

By open-sourcing the project, we hope to contribute to the Java and GraphQL communities and learn from and collaborate with everyone who will be using the framework to make it even better in the future.

The key features of the DGS Framework include:

• Annotation-based Spring Boot programming…

by Eric Eiswerth

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 the topic: Growth Engineering at Netflix — Accelerating Innovation. The primary focus of this post will be the top of the signup funnel. In particular, the Netflix homepage:

As discussed in our previous post, Growth Engineering owns the business logic and protocols that allow our UI partners to build lightweight…

By Phill Williams and Vijay Gondi

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 Extended HE-AAC with MPEG-D DRC (xHE-AAC) to compatible Android Mobile devices (Android 9 and newer). With its capability to improve intelligibility in noisy environments, adapt to variable cellular connections, and scale to studio-quality, xHE-AAC will be a sonic delight to members who stream on these devices.

xHE-AAC Features

MPEG-D DRC

One way that xHE-AAC…

By Fabio Kung, Sargun Dhillon, Andrew Spyker, Kyle Anderson, Rob Gulewich, Nabil Schear, Andrew Leung, Daniel Muino, and Manas Alekar

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 from the frontend API for netflix.com, to machine learning training workloads, to video encoders. In Titus, the hosts that workloads run on are abstracted from our users. The Titus platform maintains large pools of homogenous node capacity to run user workloads, and the Titus scheduler places workloads. This abstraction allows…