Netflix (you know, that thing you use to watch House of Cards) holds an event called Hack Days, which often showcases some wonderful and off-the-wall experiments and projects, but I think this latest project TOTALLY takes the cake, the whole cake, and NOTHING BUT the cake! Engineers Guy Cirino, Carenina Motion and Alex Wolfe have created DarNES, a hack that turns the original Nintendo Entertainment System into a Netflix playback machine. I’ll just let that soak in for a minute…..The retro-gaming console from the mid-1980s remains unchanged, as the true secret lies inside a special 256KB cartridge. While you probably don’t want to watch a blocky, 8-bit graphic marathon of Arrested Development or Orange is the New Black, it’s still pretty cool to know that you could if you really wanted to.
But….that’s not the only example of awesome projects that came out of Netflix’s Hack Day. For example, there’s BEEP, which constantly reminds you to focus on watching the tube, Netflix Earth shows activity from all over the planet, Net the Netflix Cheats vows to make sure that you only watch what your partner also wants to watch, and then there’s Say Whaaat!!!, which displays subtitles for any missed dialogue. While few – if any of these – will become official apps, the point is that Netflix is incubating these projects and allowing the engineers to rejuvenate their service through creativity.
[Thanks Netflix Tech Blog]
The PractitioNERD 