Netflix's internal Hack Day brought an incredible use of FitBit health band for late-night TV watchers to recognize if a viewer has fallen asleep and auto-pause video for later viewing.
Internal hackathons are possibly the greatest place for employees to come out of their comfort zone and bring the most innovative products and features. The recent Netflix 24 Hour Hack Day last week invented some remarkable features such as a Playlists, Radial, Netflix Beam, PIN Protection for profiles and the most highlighted-Sleep Tracker feature.
A team of five Netflix's employees, namely Sam Homer, Rachel Nordman, Ariene Aficial, Sam Park and Bogdan Ciuca, wrote the Sleep Tracker software that uses the FitBit health bracelet to automatically lower the volume or stop playing the video when the viewer dozes off. The software uses FitBit's programming interface to access the biometric data to learn wearer's status, by picking up and analyzing movements. After detecting a slept user, it also displays a message saying "Looks like you fell asleep!" and stamps the time so it can be used as a reference in future.
Other notable feature debuted at the Hack event includes Playlists that allows users to build multiple playlists, so accessing a particular movie or a show shouldn't require going through a long queue. Radial offers an on-screen dialer-style keyboard replacing the traditional QWERTY. Users accessing Netflix on gaming consoles will find the best use of this feature, as navigation from one letter to another is faster and effortless.
The hack event also showed Netflix Beam, a feature that allows users to temporarily use their Netflix account on other devices. The account will be automatically logged out when the owner takes the device away from the connected source.
Netflix engineers showed off PIN protected profiles that help lock down user's profiles on a shared account using a 4-digit pin.
The video streaming company showed videos demonstrating the new features, which can be found here in the company's press release. Even if these features excite you, it is unclear if they will actually become a part of Netflix product portfolio or internal infrastructure, TechCrunch reports.
