Can you guys in other countries find that app on your itunes stores?

Hopefully they have a batch system in place per format; that would make things a little less labor-intensive. Of course, with the technical knowledge one would have to have for a gig like this, I can’t imagine someone wouldn’t have brought that up at the company.

Now… not so bad!

Even I didn’t know the number of encodes Netflix requires.

In case anyone is wondering, it works like this:
We get an order from a studio who works out a deal with a VOD provider. We ingest their media (whether it be from HDCAM-SR tape, Digibeta, or .mov file on a hard drive, etc), capture it at ProRes 422 (HQ), it goes through one and sometimes two quality control checks (i.e. two different people watch the same movie and check for errors), then it goes to the fix department to repair any issues found during QC, on to Conformance to sync up the CC file and/or add any 5.1 audio or subtitles that may have been missing, on to Encoding should the file need to be converted to another format (usually it does, to several different formats), then to Packaging who prepare the metadata (all the info on the VOD provider’s site about the film: actors, director, synopsis, run time, release date, etc), then to a final Audit team who checks all the previous departments’ work.
All of the work is then itemized by Accounting and billed for accordingly.

Yikes! A very complicated process when I step back and look at it.

The implication in Netflix’s content agreements seems to be that if you can provide your content in as many formats as possible, you can cut costs from Netflix’s encoding services. I’m genuinely intrigued as to what their encoding specs are, simply from the perspective of someone who is always delivering multiple video formats…