Well, this is a standard feature of any average Joe's porn site for about 5 years now
Netflix's ui has been pretty terrible for a while, though, I wish they would have an alternative to the grid view. Sometimes I can't find the genre I'm looking for.
EDIT: FWIW, we also implemented this feature on our last site which was the #63 most visited site in the world at its height. So we have done it "at scale"
Also, I seriously doubt you anywhere near approached the scale of netflix's data centers. #63 most visited site doesn't compete at all with porn or netflix in terms of sheer bytes.
Just pointing out it's easy to say you can roll something out in a day, but you can never implement a feature without context.
The backend part of it is just ffmpeg, which can do pretty much all of this for you. The scaling is just a matter of throwing more servers at it, which is relatively trivial, expensive but simple. Admittedly my 1.5 days was not including generating the thumbnail sprites. But if you include that we had 2 programmers work on this for a total of less than a week.
Really? it takes in a movie and spits your thumbnails, sans spoilers, sans family un-friendly content, into your data store, already indexed? Across multiple data centers?
Seems like you're making it out to be much more trivial than it is.
EDIT: To be clear, the feature itself has trivial components. But rolling out a new feature requires far, far more than just the frontend code and an ffmpeg script.
What other product offers that? How is it central to their value proposition; what customer left because ...
These are goalpoast moving requirements, but I also wasn't the person making it out to be trivial.
Also, all these things are "good ideas", but can you imagine going to your boss and saying. "I have three-9s of the cases covered, and for the vast majority we simply refuse to show slides and almost nobody notices ... But ... I need another six months of tweaking the facial detection to get to four-9s before we ship it. To make sure nobody seems a funny face when they pause the video."
Have you considered what the expected revenue differential between the two systems is (with and without funny-face detection) and have you compared that to the cost of the time spent in a meeting discussing it, let alone the work to implement it, and then to the opportunity cost of not doing other stuff?
These comments about potential difficulties are bike-shedding in action. Nobody has anything to add so they add nothing. I'm sure we could all imagine cases where there were complex restrictions, and that'd be totally cool if these was an article about rule-engines. But it's not.
But perhaps I'm tainted because I find Netflix to be annoying, on the whole. Crappy playback options, iffy streaming of HD (even when torrents have no trouble), inconsistent audio and subtitles, and an atrocious recommendation system that seems aimed at wasting my time than recommending good content. More and more I find myself using Popcorn Time, even if the content is on Netflix.
As for serving them, it's also trivial to host on a CDN and serve them on demand (on rollover).
Possibly they'd need to work it into their licensing agreements.
So much slow in large organizations. So much.