Data at Netflix: On a Journey to Reinvent Television

With 50 million subscribers, Netflix is a major player among media and broadband companies. “We provide streaming services so people can watch whatever they want whenever they want” said Blake Irvine, a manager in the Data Science & Engineering group at Netflix.

“Tableau has become a go-to tool for data visualization and storytelling for Netflix,”–Irvine

With 300 billion data pipeline events a day and 10 billion rows of data per day “we have lots of big data,” he said. Netflix relies on data to make decisions ranging from “buying and recommending content, and improving the streaming experience on devices.”

Netflix looked to Tableau to help them make sense of their plentiful and ubiquitous data: “This is where Tableau was a nice fit with Netflix,” Irvine said.

“We had gigabytes of data coming in every second. We were filling up disk drives faster than we could set them up” said Albert Wong, a manager in the Netflix Cloud and Platform Engineering group. Cloud storage helped them keep up with their storage needs and their adoption of Tableau allowed them freedom of choice in connecting to different data sources. “Tableau is really strong in this area,” said Wong. “The tool does not dictate the data that can be used.”