> They have put more into tech side of modern-day TV/film than anybody else, and it's not even close
I feel Disney is up there too they just don't blog about it
I find it weird that people don't think of the BBC as a tech company, from their work on microphones way back in the day, to launching iPlayer (before youtube, and launching on christmas day iirc) to regular live streaming of huge events in 4k (something netflix has struggled with). But yet they are never recognised for their engineering.
They've done a lot of great stuff and I've always followed their engineering-related tools and content as well! In particular they made some major contributions to media archival and analysis tools, and, yes of course, to web players. Unfortunately they haven't put as much focus on a lot of it in recent years, at least not in the tools they've opened sourced and topics they used to write about a lot
I don't think they're not recognized for it, they just don't brand themselves as it.
For as long as broadcasting has been a thing, major broadcasters were involved in pushing the technology forward. For most of it's history the American network NBC was a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America. But NBC's brand is not tech, they want to consumer to associate the gliz of the picture.
All of the players in this echelon have contributed massively, and all of them have pretty wild workflows and impressive solutions to technical problems. If we were measuring technical achievement across the broader history of filmed entertainment, there’s a strong case to be made for Disney as the most influential. But when it comes to how content is produced and distributed today, Netflix has definitely invested the most into tackling modern challenges and continues to do so, and these efforts feed directly into the meticulous, end-to-end workflow that’s applied across every production.
There are plenty of people who have worked on Netflix and non-Netflix shows and would would argue that Netflix's workflow and high standards are difficult if you're not used to it yet, or more stringent than they'd like, but very few would deny the end results or technical superiority
Yeah I really just don't see how you are getting these "Netflix is the most" figures, considering the scale of Disney and how they constantly push technical boundaries in production, vfx, animation, etc
the disney studios (walt disney animation, walt disney pictures, pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Blue Sky, 20th Century Fox) contributed a significant amount of research towards technologies used in film and television, much of it in academic conferences like SIGGRAPH