Netflix Open Content
Key topics
The debate around Netflix's Open Content initiative has sparked curiosity, with some users pointing out that the last addition was made in 2020, while others dug up evidence of more recent updates. Commenters are divided on the value of the content, with one noting that while it's available for download without an account, it's still unclear why Netflix is hosting it, with some speculating it's for testing purposes. A peculiar observation about links being routed through Google's URL tracking has also raised eyebrows, although one astute commenter attributed it to a quirk of copying URLs from Google search results. As users continue to poke around the site, the discussion remains relevant, shining a light on the often-overlooked corners of a major tech company's open content efforts.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
22m
Peak period
63
0-6h
Avg / period
14
Based on 140 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 30, 2025 at 5:11 AM EST
11 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 30, 2025 at 5:33 AM EST
22m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
63 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 3, 2026 at 8:03 AM EST
6d ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
(Or earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25801075)
The only real way to avoid leaking specific urls from the source page to the arbitrary other server is to have an intermediary redirect like this.
All the big products put an intermediary for that reason, though many of them make it a user visible page of that says "you are leaving our product" versus Google mostly does it as an immediate redirect.
The copy/paste behavior is mostly an unfortunate side effect and not a deliberate feature of it.
Also, isn't this what Referrer-Policy is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason
Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?
And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .
Not sure if the reliability of the intentional mechanism has improved enough where this is just legacy or if there's entirely new reasons for it in 2026.
I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.
Why? Because I had it for 20+ years, and I still didn't find an easy way to automatically migrate it to WordPress.
GP speaks wisdom.
It probably is, given that it's just a static page hosted on blogger.com
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/exampl...
But technically, you're right.
"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...
Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
Isn't AV2 coming out this year?
> Such a pity startups can’t innovate on the content stores of the big companies.
What do you mean?
Which has less than 48 hours to go.
I miss director commentary, I loved re-watching movies with that audio track.
Is there just too much content now? Or has streaming become such a "content mill" that the creators aren't inspired enough about their own work to sit down and talk about it after it's complete?
I would guess this is the reason. Before basically unlimited content or ways to entertain yourself on a screen, having additional content on a disc would have been a marketing point to make people feel like they’re getting extra.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
I liked it quite a bit.
It is funny that these things often just get released on podcast platforms and aren't really integrated into the streaming service.
Especially since this show, and the shows mentioned in these parent comments are all produced by the platforms they got released on. So they also have a whole lot more control to actually integrate this extra content.
These streaming platforms often state they are competing to keep you on their platform consuming things, and it seems odd to me that they wouldn't want to try and capture people for longer with these kinds of extras. Especially since as the other user indicated, these would be much lower cost to produce and license compared to the original content. And for someone who really enjoyed what they watched it would be a pretty appealing extra to have.
No such incentive is necessary with streaming, the format competes so well on convenience it doesn't have to invest in extra content.
Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.
Having the raw EXR sequences and the IMF packages for Sol Levante and Meridian means researchers can finally benchmark AV1 vs HEVC vs VVC using source material that actually has the dynamic range to show the differences. The fact that they included the Dolby vision metadata is the cherry on top.
Anyone can freely license a work to the public, and copyright holders were doing that long before modern computers were invented.
“Open source” (other than, say, in open water sources or intelligence or journalistic contexts, where it was rarely used) as a descriptive term did not enter the common lexicon until 1998 and that was specifically to refer to software source code.
Maybe 30 years?
Just distribute the prompt and I'll generate my own movie on the fly, with my own tweaks of course.
As long as humans have dreams it won't be like that. The human spirit and desire to connect to others and tell stories doesn't just suddenly die.
Look at the history of photography itself to see an example. "But... but... but my portrait-painting skills will be obsolete! Somebody do something. Waaah."
> If AI didn't promise massive artistic disruption -- the sort that threatens to put real creative power into the hands of outsiders -- no one would object.
Putting creative power into the hands of outsiders isn't important. In fact, creative power is currently in the hands of outsiders. You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
The bottleneck on great art has never been technology but the creative vision of the individual. Increased AI presence in art will do nothing to alleviate that bottleneck.
With that said, I am not bothered by the emergence of AI or its applications for any kind of art. I'm just a realist. It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
>You do not need a cinema studio to make a good film. There is nothing stopping most people from making a good feature length film and putting it up on YouTube except for their willpower, spirit, and creativity.
That being said, it's not true. Even Robert Rodriguez had to exercise a modicum of management skill and spend a non-trivial amount of money to get El Mariachi made. And even then, the available resources severely constrained what he could do with $7000 (about $20000 today).
The next Rodriguez is probably already using half-baked, primitive tools like WAN 2.2 to blow us all away. We just don't know who he or she is yet.
Something else that's not true is:
>It will enable equally enable both the great and the shitty, so in the end it is a wash.
The great works add far more to our culture than the shitty works take away.
You are right that not everyone can make a great film, but I would still contend that most everyone (in the US and Europe) has the right material conditions to make a great film (access to a camera, editing software, people, and locations). You'd need great discipline, leadership, creativity, and charisma to get it done. Most people lack one or more of those qualities.
I find it unfortunate that entire categories of artistic expression will be lost in your vision of the future. I do not doubt that people would continue telling stories, I'm concerned with the crew.
FWIW, I feel the same way about this as I did about model making and matte painting for film in the 90s. I never thought movies would stop being made.
They can be safely ignored... at least here, and at least for now.
As it currently stands, most things are crap. The speed is not the bottleneck.
Agreed. I also have a few decades of experience in film and television production, mostly in creating and deploying new digital tooling paradigms from 'desktop video' in the 90s to virtual sets to real-time 3D environments. New digital production tools have almost always had the biggest impact enabling low-end and mid-tier creatives, not big budget studio productions. In the early 90s the Amiga-based Video Toaster enabled upstart productions like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Babylon 5. The Toaster also enabled about 95% more cable-access crap and bad porn but the other 5% was fantastically creative new stuff which couldn't have existed on indy budgets. Dramatic new production paradigms tend to unleash both democratization and disruption. Most people welcome the democratization yet reflexively fear the disruption. Today, few recall the early 90s predictions from the professional production industry of desktop video causing economic and creative doom, despite being widespread and echoed across mainstream media.
While machine learning-based production tools aren't flexible or granular enough yet for more than limited experiments, there's no reason they won't become increasingly useful for real work. IMHO they'll likely have the same kind of democratizing impact as desktop video and the Toaster - 95% more regrettable crap, some of which we're already starting to see but, eventually, also 5% more wonderfully creative stuff which wouldn't have existed without it.
http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ind...
Best tv tech to date, though OLED improvements in the past year mean we might see good panels hitting the market in a few years.
Agree with the in store crap and all the processing that’s turned on for the TVs on display. But brightness is useful - can help combat ambient light, and HDR can look amazing.
Much like your car's top speed, you are not always required to use the brightest possible setting on your TV.
You will be hard pressed to find a blu-ray or dvd release of any netflix show in the US.
As someone that enjoys having a physical offline media collection, and who does not want to support netflix, I am often forced to buy japanese copies or bootleg copies of netflix shows whereas I can buy legitimate US copies from virtually all other studios.
Even hits like K-Pop demon hunters, netflix has forbidden physical purchase or ownership, so piracy is the only option for those who are not netflix customers or want to watch offline on a blu-ray player on an airplane.
Plus it makes it way easier to hand select shows to hand a kid to play in a portable media player, and avoids the need to give them unrestricted alone time with an internet capable device.
I prefer official copies but if the studios do not allow them and thus do not want my money then bootlegs it is.
You're on a site called Hacker News, and don't know how to burn a video file to DVD?
If I were worried about longevity, I would not personally rely on a bunch of DVDs I burned.
So load the files onto hard drives as a backup. That's what I do.
It doesn't seem like you're looking for a solution, just a reason to hear yourself complain.
It seems like your intent here was just to be condescending and rude.
This feels to me like an intentional obfuscation-- like the studio didn't actually want to open-source anything meaningful, or netflix didn't pay them enough to justify collecting huge project files.
Blocked loading mixed active content “http://download.opencontent.netflix.com.s3.amazonaws.com/?de...”
It seems to be something like blocking loading any HTTP request from an HTTPS page. Very annoying :(
Unlike netflix/YouTube its not immediately clear to me which Organisation would spearhead something like this out of their own interesting. Closest I know of is the MuseGroup, which are doing this "growing of the pie" with open source music creation Software.
Anyone know of something else?