What’s going on in this photo?
Macarena lessons? A support group for elbowless people? Nope, this photo was taken at a Netflix distribution center, where envelope openers are taking a stretching break. It turns out that at Netflix facilities many tasks, including opening envelopes, inspecting discs, and stuffing envelopes are performed by hand.
The article linked above was pretty light on details, but this one has some great photos and a very informative video (embedded below). I imagined a Netflix distribution facility to include a warehouse filled floor-to-ceiling with DVDs, but apparently they only need a small handful of shelving units:
Which makes sense, I suppose, when you consider how densely the discs can be stored. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that on each shelf in the photo above, they can fit about 3500 DVDs. I can see at least 40 shelves in the photo, which means they’re storing at least 140,000 discs. Netflix claims they stock 100,000 films, so that lower bound feels about right, but I bet their distribution centers have closer to 2-300,000 discs not out on rental at any given point.
Netflix’s operation is remarkably efficient and well-engineered, which isn’t surprising for a company that’s offering a million dollars to anyone who can improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%.
July 5th, 2009 at 12:10 am
A little over a week ago, a team reported a 10.05% increase in recommendation algorithm.
Also, interesting to see the size of the warehouse. I had heard a rumor that no people were necessary for the physical distribution of the netflix disks (other than the mail). I guess thats false. Too bad, I kinda liked it that way before
July 6th, 2009 at 11:52 am
You would think that at least the envelope packing could be done by robots. It looks like she’s only doing a few simple motions.
July 7th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
@Erik: I was also pretty surprised that they do it manually. I’d love to talk to one of their operations people; I bet systems/operations engineers are valued quite highly at Netflix.