Netflix hack uses FitBit to pause movies when you fall asleep

With the sheer number of Netflix users who have shifted their video consumption style to what is now affectionately referred to as “binge watching,” there’s got to be more than a few people out there guilty of falling asleep mid-episode. These people exist above and beyond those of us who already are guilty of falling asleep during a late night movie on Netflix.

A recent internal Hackathon involving Netflix employees revealed a clever solution cobbled together in 24 hours thanks to FitBit’s body tracking capabilities, but don’t go looking for this as an app you can install anytime soon.

What makes this demonstration so clever is the level of interaction between the FitBit and Netflix. Instead of just pausing the video when FitBit thinks you’ve fallen asleep, the audio slowly tapers off and then the video stops, popping up a message that explains why Netflix has behaved this way. If you have actually fallen asleep, when you wake up again you can choose to watch from the point that Netflix determined you started sleeping thanks to data from FitBit, or you can watch from when the video was actually paused.

The Netflix Open Source Hackathon is an internal team-building, prize giving, fun having event where developers can step away from what they are currently working on at Netflix and just play. The end results are presented on the YouTube channel to show off how clever everyone is, but those videos include giant messages explaining that Netflix isn’t necessarily pursuing these hacks as features.

While that’s kind of a bummer, this demonstration opens the door to exploring the combination of wearables and streaming video, especially with tech like Google’s Chromecast sitting behind so many televisions now.