Netflix recently hosted an internal 24-hour Hack Day, in which company developers experimented with crazy or unique ideas that wouldn't normally get researched or tried by a team.
There were some great creations, which I'll talk about below, the best of which is a hack that uses fitness app FitBit to determine whether you've fallen asleep while watching a movie on Netflix, and pauses the streaming video where it is so you don't miss out and lose your spot.
How it works, shown in the video below, is by collecting data from a running Fitbit app on the user's person, likely monitoring motion (I'm not sure how it differentiates from someone who just isn't move a muscle, hopefully it's good at it!) and communicates with Netflix to pause the video. The stream will fade out video and audio and leave a prompt.
The next day, you can open Netflix back up to what you were watching, and there is an option to continue where you fell asleep. Pretty cool, and maybe we'll see this make it into the real Netflix programming.
Some other great ideas that Netflix shared on its Youtube page included a new keyboard called Radial, which is a circular design that is much easier to type with when using a controller, if you watch Netflix on your console. You can flick in a direction or rotate through the letters with the control stick rather than scrolling past a bunch of letters to get to the one you need.
I'm sort of shocked the rows and columns layout used on computers is still the standard on consoles and with remotes, as it's incredibly inefficient and tedious. The Radial design reminds me of the Daisywheel layout Valve developed for Steam's Big Picture mode for typing with controllers and both make much more sense than the standard layout.
Other inventions include Playlists, a design for multiple playlists rather than one large queue and Netflix Beam, which lets your friends temporarily use your account on their devices if they're at your house, and automatically logs them out when they're done.
None of these are promised, or even planned, by Netflix to become part of the program, but were merely ideas developers created. It stands to reason, though, if Netflix likes the idea behind any of them enough, they could make it into the official application one day.
