Snippet: Netflix Encodes Movies More Than 120 Times Each ☇

Janko Roettgers for GigaOm shares the steps Netflix takes to ensure that a video plays on each device as efficiently as possible. As much as everyone likes to complain about Netflix, this is a pretty impressive level of geekery (via The Frequency):

Getting Netflix streams to play on all of your devices requires a whole lot of encoding: The company is preparing 120 different versions of each movie to deal with different screen sizes and bandwidth requirements, according to a recently published behind-the-scenes video.