Netflix Hack Day 2014 - Watch With Friends - Homepage

Hey guys,

Fortunately I had time to participate in the Netflix Hack Day this year. Last year I was swamped with projects and wasn't able to work on anything.

This year I decided to create a feature I've been wishing we had for a long time... "Watch With Friends". It's basically a way for users to invite friends to a party and suggest / watch movies & shows from separate accounts and locations, discuss the movie as they watch, and just enjoy the movie Netflix experience together without actually being together.

My wife frequently travels to China for work and we try to create our own version of this feature via counting down and hitting play at the same time to sync our video playback, and using skype to chat. The goal with my hack was to integrate this into Netflix itself and make the process as frictionless, useful, and enjoyable as possible. As I worked on this feature I also did a kind of unsolicited full redesign on top of integrating this feature, just for fun.

If you want to read more about hack day or check our a few of the other hacks that were blogged about you can check it out here: http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/08/netflix-hack-day-summer-2014.html