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| California streaming: an inside look at the Netflix 'war room' | California streaming: an inside look at the Netflix 'war room' |
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| A dozen product engineers, computer scientists, and localization specialists hover over their MacBook Pros in the King Kong conference room at Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California. There are two replicas of the Empire State building in the middle of the table (in keeping with the theme) and a large screen at the end of the table featuring several different charts, a TweetDeck tracking the mentions of #Netflix on Twitter, and a clock that is counting down toward midnight. It seems like the command center at MI6: when the clock strikes zero, the world will explode if James Bond and these nimble people at their screens don’t stop it. | A dozen product engineers, computer scientists, and localization specialists hover over their MacBook Pros in the King Kong conference room at Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos, California. There are two replicas of the Empire State building in the middle of the table (in keeping with the theme) and a large screen at the end of the table featuring several different charts, a TweetDeck tracking the mentions of #Netflix on Twitter, and a clock that is counting down toward midnight. It seems like the command center at MI6: when the clock strikes zero, the world will explode if James Bond and these nimble people at their screens don’t stop it. |
| This is a “war room” that has been set up for the night, and the zero for the countdown clock is when the streaming service will launch their latest original program, Marvel’s Daredevil. While Netflix is getting closer to its goal of having an original show premiere every other week, Daredevil was the first of its properties to be released simultaneously to all of its 57 million members, at 12.01am PST on 10 April. That includes all 50 countries that offer the service, including newer markets such as France, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Chile. | |
| Related: Meet Daredevil, TV’s emo superhero | Related: Meet Daredevil, TV’s emo superhero |
| There is a ring of television monitors circling the giant conference table, each hooked up to a different device that can deliver Netflix and each tuned to a different market. At the stroke of 12, a ceremonial switch is flipped and quality assurance is checked in each market and on each device. It is official: Daredevil is live. The mentions of Daredevil and Netflix start humming by on TweetDeck, coming so furiously it is impossible to read them. Many of them are from rabid fans of the comic book just typing, “Daredevil!!!!!” It’s the social media equivalent of the screech that greets One Direction whenever they step out of a hotel lobby. | There is a ring of television monitors circling the giant conference table, each hooked up to a different device that can deliver Netflix and each tuned to a different market. At the stroke of 12, a ceremonial switch is flipped and quality assurance is checked in each market and on each device. It is official: Daredevil is live. The mentions of Daredevil and Netflix start humming by on TweetDeck, coming so furiously it is impossible to read them. Many of them are from rabid fans of the comic book just typing, “Daredevil!!!!!” It’s the social media equivalent of the screech that greets One Direction whenever they step out of a hotel lobby. |
| The show’s path to launch started in 2013, when Marvel came to Netflix with an aggressive pitch. The comic book giant, which has been slaying at the box office with its interconnected Avengers movies, “wanted to tell serialized, gritty stories that were mostly character-driven”, Allie Goss, Netflix’s director of content acquisitions, says. The idea was to do five shows, one show featuring each of four different superheroes in New York and the fifth combining those four into one team, The Defenders. | The show’s path to launch started in 2013, when Marvel came to Netflix with an aggressive pitch. The comic book giant, which has been slaying at the box office with its interconnected Avengers movies, “wanted to tell serialized, gritty stories that were mostly character-driven”, Allie Goss, Netflix’s director of content acquisitions, says. The idea was to do five shows, one show featuring each of four different superheroes in New York and the fifth combining those four into one team, The Defenders. |
| Daredevil is the first of these shows to launch and is a darker adaptation than the much-derided 2003 Ben Affleck movie version. Like the comic, it tells the story of Matt Murdock, a man who was blinded in an accident as a child when his face was splashed with toxic waste. He was left blinded but with all of his other senses heightened to an extraordinary degree. He grows up to become a lawyer who crusades for innocent people wrongly accused of crimes – and also a masked vigilante protecting the residents of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood (which has been dramatically sanitized IRL since the comic book premiered in 1964). | Daredevil is the first of these shows to launch and is a darker adaptation than the much-derided 2003 Ben Affleck movie version. Like the comic, it tells the story of Matt Murdock, a man who was blinded in an accident as a child when his face was splashed with toxic waste. He was left blinded but with all of his other senses heightened to an extraordinary degree. He grows up to become a lawyer who crusades for innocent people wrongly accused of crimes – and also a masked vigilante protecting the residents of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood (which has been dramatically sanitized IRL since the comic book premiered in 1964). |
| Goss says that the notoriously controlling Marvel was actually an ideal collaborator and that Netflix did have creative input – not just on the creation of the series but the scripts and final cuts of each episode as well. | Goss says that the notoriously controlling Marvel was actually an ideal collaborator and that Netflix did have creative input – not just on the creation of the series but the scripts and final cuts of each episode as well. |
| Once the show is finalized, about a month before launch the original video is presented to Netflix’s product team, which needs to make hundreds of different encodings of that video to fit every sort of device (mobile phones, tables, gaming consoles, as well as laptops and television sets) and every sort of bandwidth. Netflix is equipped to switch from different encodings of the video based on the device a subscriber is using and how fast that user’s internet is at any given moment. The goal is for the stream to never come to a complete stop. “We would rather degrade the quality of the video and not interrupt the viewing experience, and then bring the quality back up once the broadband is back up to speed,” Chris Jaffe, Netflix vice president of product innovation, says about the process. | |
| Since it is launching globally, Daredevil (and all of Netflix’s original shows) needs to be translated into all the different languages spoken where the service is available. Each show gets both subtitles and dubbing into that language. Most of that work is done by outside contractors, but Netflix has teams that do quality control and monitor the cultural sensitivity of the translations. | |
| About a week before the launch, Netflix starts promoting the show on the service with banner ads and petitions to watch the trailer. It specifically targets users that will be interested in the new offering. The company tracks this using a complicated tag system (you know, those “romantic comedies with a strong female lead and a dog that saves the day” categories you see when you’re browsing content) and algorithms to let what you’ve enjoyed in the past help determine what you’ll see in the future. “We’re not looking to shamelessly promote the show,” says Todd Yellin, vice president of user interface. “We want to surface the right content for the right person at the right time.” | |
| Thanks to this promotion and Daredevil’s built-in fan base, social media director Eric Pallotta says that pre-launch chatter for Daredevil has been bigger on social media than it has been for any of Netflix’s other original programs. This should forecast its popularity. (Though it uses the data it collects to make many of its decisions, Netflix won’t issue statistics about how many people watch its shows and doesn’t seem motivated to do so in the future.) | Thanks to this promotion and Daredevil’s built-in fan base, social media director Eric Pallotta says that pre-launch chatter for Daredevil has been bigger on social media than it has been for any of Netflix’s other original programs. This should forecast its popularity. (Though it uses the data it collects to make many of its decisions, Netflix won’t issue statistics about how many people watch its shows and doesn’t seem motivated to do so in the future.) |
| Launching the show in all of its territories at once certainly solves a lot of old problems for those in countries that have traditionally had to adroitly dodge spoilers while waiting for the buzziest shows to make their way to their shores. “People in the UK are more sensitive to spoilers because they’ve gotten the shaft for so many years having to wait [for shows],” Pallotta says. | Launching the show in all of its territories at once certainly solves a lot of old problems for those in countries that have traditionally had to adroitly dodge spoilers while waiting for the buzziest shows to make their way to their shores. “People in the UK are more sensitive to spoilers because they’ve gotten the shaft for so many years having to wait [for shows],” Pallotta says. |
| While there is no accounting for taste, people around the world are starting to crave the same kinds of content. “We’re amazed at how global tastes have become,” Anne Trench, the director of customer insight, says. That might seem to defy expectation, but it makes perfect sense, since the US’s greatest export these days is culture. | |
| After Daredevil goes live across the world, a graph on the giant screen in the conference room starts to register how many people are watching the program. The graph is trending upwards. It might be midnight in California, but it’s 6pm in Australia, a perfect time for watching the noir-inspired adventures of a masked man with superb hearing. Champagne is circulated and the engineers start to relax and chatter among themselves. King Kong might not have been able to conquer New York, but Netflix has managed to get a superhero to fly around the world all at once with the flick of a switch. | After Daredevil goes live across the world, a graph on the giant screen in the conference room starts to register how many people are watching the program. The graph is trending upwards. It might be midnight in California, but it’s 6pm in Australia, a perfect time for watching the noir-inspired adventures of a masked man with superb hearing. Champagne is circulated and the engineers start to relax and chatter among themselves. King Kong might not have been able to conquer New York, but Netflix has managed to get a superhero to fly around the world all at once with the flick of a switch. |