Netflix's Hack Day and the hacks we wish were a reality

Let’s add Netflix to the list of companies we’d happily sell our souls to work for. According to the Netflix Tech Blog, the company is all about innovation, creativity and building awesome stuff. That’s why it’s begun the soon-to-be tradition of holding a Hack Day, when its engineering teams are encouraged to develop an idea from early Thursday morning all throughout the night, which they’ll then present to their peers 24 hours later.

Although they may never become part of the Netflix product, some of these hacks are brilliant and would be invaluable to the streaming service’s users. Our favourites included:

Netflix beam: a feature that works in the same way Bump used to (it’s dead now), just tap your device against someone else’s and they can watch what you want them to watch using your Netflix account.

Sleep tracking with Fitbit: a brilliant and simple way for Netflix to track when a viewer has nodded off using Fitbit’s wearables.

Radial: a much easier way for you to type out words using a gamepad and a circular keyboard.

Custom playlists: ideal for weekend-long Netflix binges, you can add specific episodes and save each playlist by themes or events.

Check out a longer list of the best hacks over on The Netflix Tech Blog.