Netflix’s Media Production Suite

I read through that whole article thinking,

   - I wonder what the UI looks like compared to tools I use now
   - I wonder if there will be a free tier, since my video needs are modest

It never occurred to me until I reached the end that this wasn't a "enjoy this tool we made" post, but instead a "look how awesome we are" post. :-/

For people in within the industry or the tech side of it, Netflix’s engineering blog has always been fascinating and extremely useful because of the insane amount of stuff in this space they have solved or reworked. They have put more into tech side of modern-day TV/film than anybody else, and it's not even close. In a technical/workflow sense, working on a Netflix show is unlike working on any other. I have my issues with Netflix in other respects, but with respect to technology and workflow, they are awesome.

If you’re unable to appreciate a behind-the-scenes look at their engineering because the technology isn't for you or available to you, that's totally valid! But it's a you're not interested thing, not a Netflix is boasting about something that doesn't matter thing. Only a few thousand teams in the world need most of what they do over there, but that doesn't mean they aren't massive technical achievements. Most of them are. The scale, complexity, and cadence of modern production has given rise to some of the biggest technical challenges I’ve ever seen. And for anyone close to that world, this kind of content is of great interest — if not genuinely valuable.

Netflix get away with it because they own the result at the end of the process. If you were to suggest these workflows to other studios they'd balk at the idea of having the raw stuff being uploaded to the cloud etc. If they tried selling this as a solution do we think people outside Netflix would buy and use it?

One of the people I worked with that is now at Netflix on this stuff was so violently opposed to not owning his own in office render farm and drive array it verged on ridiculous.

The major studios use cloud services all the time. For example, Paramount uses AWS. Disney has its own internal cloud system but also uses a combination of external clouds like AWS.

The resistance to cloud services is based on preventing leaks, not opposition to technology.

And in specific response to your comment: Netflix's "technology" is just a content management system. They're just reinventing a wheel that many of their competitors already use and bragging about something that Disney, Paramount, etc., did over a decade ago when they began embracing digital-first production.