Netflix Presentation Shows a Brief History of Their Streaming Technology (video)

Netflix started streaming in 2007 with an Internet Explorer plugin that hosted Windows Media Player. Today, there are more than 80 million active Netflix devices including smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and connected TV’s. At the Streaming Media East show in May, David Ronca, Manager of Encoding Tools at Netflix, walked through the technical history of the Netflix streaming service, looking at some of the key engineering decisions, codec and packaging, and a few key hacks. Some of topics he covered included Netflix’s first adaptive streaming client, their most unusual project, the BD-Live adaptive streaming client, and how Netflix developed their iPad app in just 60 days. You can download David’s slides from the presentation here.