Earlier this month, the folks at Netflix decided to give their product development teams a little time away from their daily grind with what they called Netflix Hack Day.
Within 24 hours, their teams came up with some pretty cool (and crazy) stuff. My favorite is DarNES: a version of Netflix running on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Considering they say it's running on an "unmodified" NES, it doesn't seem to actually be getting online and checking the Netflix servers, but it's still a cool little tech demo. They came up with a pretty clever (if barely usable) way of scrolling through titles that functions as a Mario-like platform game.
I would never actually watch Netflix this way, but I applaud the effort nonetheless.
A much more practical (and still really cool) featured hacked together during Hack Day is "Say Whaaat!!!" You know all those times when you're watching Arrow and your spouse leans over to you to ask, "What did that guy just say?" and you make something up because you don't want them to know you weren't paying attention? With this feature, you could pause the film and immediately see what the caption for that bit of dialogue says. Handy!
To be fair, maybe I shouldn't be looking away from the screen so much anyway. For that, there's BEEP.
But what about the spouse that says they'll wait for you to watch the next episode of The IT Crowd, but they watch it without you while you're at work? Another Hack Day feature allows you to "lock" movies and shows down so that your loved ones can't watch that stuff without you.
And if you just want to see what everybody else in the world is watching on Netflix at that moment? Boot up Netflix Earth to see a globe filled with people who are watching shows. If you zoom in really close, you might be able to see me finally watching Snowpiercer.
You can find more info on these fun little hacks (which may/probably will never become real Netflix features), as well as photos from the event, at the Netflix Tech Blog.
