In a global media business, Hollywood is often producing dozens of versions for each movie. This week, Netflix is also open-sourcing a set of tools tackling a common problem for studios and video services. Why Netflix is releasing tools that will help iTunes Now, it wants to nudge Hollywood to do the same - and “Meridian” is only the beginning. Thanks to its Silicon Valley DNA, Netflix has long collaborated with other companies on cloud computing-focused open source projects. “They are in the business of exploiting content, not of giving it away,” Fetner said.īut for Netflix, it’s just par of the course.
Netflix is using a Creative Commons license for the release of “Meridian,” which is new for an industry that isn’t used to sharing a lot of resources. “It’s a weird story wrapped up in a bunch of engineering requirements,” said Chris Fetner, the company’s director for content partner operations. Netflix produced “Meridian” as test footage to evaluate anything from the performance of video codecs to the way Netflix streams look like on 4K TVs.Īnd now, the company is giving the film away for free, so that others can do their own tests with it, be it hardware manufacturers, codec developers or even competitors like Amazon and Hulu. That’s because although “Meridian” is available on the streaming service worldwide, it was made not for Netflix’s 83 million subscribers, but for algorithms and their programmers. Netflix’s latest original program, “Meridian,” is spooky, confusing, and only 12 minutes long.