In Poland, the streaming service is looking for:

• Software Engineer (L5),
• Director, Content Engineering,
• Marketing Production Manager,
• Product Manager.

The company opened its first office in Poland six years ago. During this time, more than 30 Polish films and series have been put on Netflix. This includes High Water and How I Fell in Love with the Gangster.

“Our engineers in Poland will be helping create products for internal and external partners. Poland has an amazing engineering talent pool, especially given its excellent universities and strong developer community,”

the official statement said.

Many IT specialists from Ukraine live and work in Poland. According to Polish customs, 5.5 million people left Ukraine for Poland since the beginning of the war. In addition, about 45% of new companies in 2022 were opened by Ukrainians. Among them are individual entrepreneurs in the field of IT.

Now Netflix is hiring. The company is looking for specialists with good knowledge of local languages to complete the team of the new regional office in Warsaw.

“We plan to open a Netflix CEE office in Warsaw later this year that will function as a hub for the region. The Netflix office in Warsaw is a natural next step for us and will help build long-term cooperation in the region as well as deepen existing ties, creating new opportunities for content creators and producers. The creativity and potential of the local industry make Warsaw a great place to base our business across Central and Eastern Europe,”

the Netflix Jobs web page says.

Currently, the job opening are the following:

• Marketing Production Manager with knowledge of Polish;
• Social Marketing Manager with written and oral communication skills in English and in at least one CEE Language (Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian);
• Marketing Manager with written and oral communication skills in English and fluency in any of the languages (Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Ukrainian).

You can find all vacancies here.

Netflix localized its service in Poland in 2016. Soon after that its streaming became available in Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian. In 2021 the service was also localized in Ukrainian. Throughout this time, CEE has become a strategic production hub for Netflix’s international shows, with major titles like Extraction 2 or Shadow & Bone S01 successfully shot in the region recently.

Why is it interesting

The Netflix office in Warsaw will help the company to build a long-term cooperation in the region and deepen existing ties, creating new opportunities for content creators and producers.

For Ukrainians, the opening of the new regional office in Poland, which will also cover Ukrainian market among others, is definitely good news. Western companies often mixed up Ukraine with russia, which is wrong and inappropriate, especially considering the fact that russia launched a hybrid war with Ukraine in 2014, and a full-scale war on February 24, 2022.

Netflix doesn’t make this mistake anymore. Moreover, the company suspended its services in russia and stopped the production of all russian projects in the early March.

The Netflix office in Warsaw will help the company build long-term cooperation in the region and deepen existing ties, creating new opportunities for content creators and producers.

“In Poland alone, we have invested over 490 million PLN (~115 mln USD) in original Netflix films and series and have created over 2600 jobs on our productions, giving opportunities to actors, scriptwriters, directors and all of the below-the-line crews who are the backbone of every production. In parallel, we have consistently invested in licensing many hugely popular local titles in Czechia, Romania, Hungary and others. CEE has also become a strategic production hub for our international shows, with major titles like Extraction 2 or Shadow & Bone S01 successfully shot in the region recently,” says Netflix.

Netflix localized its service in Poland in 2016. Soon after that, streaming became available in Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, and Ukrainian. Now the office in Warsaw will become a base for Netflix’s business across Central and Eastern Europe, which will help the company continue developing its business in the region.

UPD: Rhino is already available on Netflix. 

About the movie

Rhino is Oleh Sentsov’s second feature-length film, which has already been premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The story centers on a man from the 1990s nicknamed Rhino who is trapped in the criminal world. The shooting took place in Krivyi Rih, Lviv, and Kyiv and ended in December 2020. The main role in the film was played by Serhii Filimonov.

Why it’s interesting

When the biggest streaming platform buys a Ukrainian film, it means a broad audience from all over the world will see it. It is a good chance for local filmmakers to become world-famous and continue developing.

This is not the first time Netflix bought the right to a Ukrainian film. At the end of December 2021, the company acquired a 5-year license to the documentary co-produced by Ukraine, France, and Poland Home Games, directed by the Ukrainian Alisa Kovalenko. Territorially, the license covers the UK and the EU countries.

You can already check out the new rates for the three tariff plans on the streaming service website in the Help Center section. The basic plan costs €4.99 (149 UAH), while the price for the standard one is €7.49 (224 UAH), and the premium one — €9.99 (299 UAH). Previously, they cost €7.99, €9.99, and €11.99, respectively.

The prices are lower than in Poland, where the basic plan costs 29 zlotys, or €6.20. In the US, the cheapest Netflix subscription costs $8.99.

What is this series about?

The Billion Dollar Code is a German series directed by Robert Tahlheim for Netflix. Based on a true story — a lawsuit of the German company Art+Com against Google after Google got their technology to create Google Earth. The series consists only of four episodes, and the plot follows two interconnected timelines: the current time (2017) showing their debates at a court and the past (the 1990s) when Art+Com was founded.

Based on a true story

In the 1990s, a German startup that we know as Art+Com has developed Terra Vision, a geodata visualization service, for Deutsche Telekom. In 2014, Art+Com accused Google of stealing its product’s code to create the popular Google Earth service. And they sued the hi-tech giant in Delaware Federal Court for patent infringement.

The German company claimed that Google Earth allegedly uses technology protected with the U.S. Patent No. RE44,550 (Method and Device for Pictorial Representation of Space-related Data). They wanted to get a compensation of $100 million for this infringement.

“Google Earth bears remarkable similarities to ART+COM’s commercial system, which was developed nearly a decade prior to Google’s introduction of Google Earth; and Google’s infringement has been willful,” said the article published on the German enterprise’s website on February 20, 2014.

Their main claim was that the first version of TerraVision was developed using Onyx computers of Silicon Graphics which were the most powerful available at the time. Art+Com also worked directly with Silicon Graphics, whose two ex-employees later were hired by Google to executive positions: Michael Jones, CTO at Google Earth, and Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering at Google. The German company claimed that they both knew of TerraVision and its performance, and Jones even had access to the proprietary information of Art+Com. During proceedings, the Germans presented screenshots of TerraVision from 1996 and screenshots of Google Earth from 2014 to show their similarity.

More details you can find here. As a result, the German art collective lost; the verdict, in that case, was for Google, and the jury declared the TerraVision patent invalid.

There is also an article of Avi Bar-Zeev, one of the developers of the first version of Google Earth in 1999, where he acknowledged the innovation of the Art+Com product but denied the accusation that the code had been stolen: “I’d honestly never heard of ART+COM or TerraVision until a month ago. I wasn’t contacted for the lawsuit or the series…” wrote Avi.

Is it worth watching?

The best illustration of the whole series is a duel between the lawyers of Art+Com and Google:

— I see what you are trying to achieve with your sentimental stories: you are trying to make computer-era Robin Hoods of them!

— Maybe it is what they really are.

The series producers told us a story of two characters: Carsten, a designer, and Juri, a programming genius, who became friends with common interests. Carsten wanted to create the greatest work of art ever, and Juri knew how to help him achieve that.

Together they developed an innovative product — geographical information visualization service, identical to Google Earth — at a time when it didn’t exist.

On the one hand, the series can awake nostalgia among the viewers: it contains a fragment from the legendary Steve Jobs’s presentation of the first Macintosh, it mentions the calculator Z22, the speech of young Bill Gates about personal computers that everybody will be able to afford.

You see true geek characters who love technology and art, quoting Star Track episodes, discussing famous sci-fi writers like Neal Stephenson (who inspired Jeff Bezos to fly into the space) and playing virtual ping-pong on a screen made of highlighted empty beer bottles. And it is exactly the same version of the Atari game. They even visit a festival in the 90s similar to Burning Man.

On the other hand, you see naive romantic innovators tricked and defeated by the mega-corporation. We didn’t like episodes where you could play startup-bullshit bingo because of so many cliches like visionary, revolution, innovation, and mentioning Jobs in vain.

Here the characters don’t create just a service; no, they want to change the world “to make everybody happy, for free, that nobody leaves unhappy.” They believe that their software will erase the borders between countries and nations. And during one of his monologues, Juri even describes an idea that sounds similar to the trend of modern startups — the “Metauniverse” (that’s what Facebook currently does). The atmosphere of the series, in general, feels like David Fincher’s The Social Network or Silicon Valley from HBO. If you like those two, you will love The Billion Dollar Code. However, in our opinion, it is worse than both of them. And there are almost no jokes.

The company has started looking for employees to join the Kyiv office. Two openings have already been published on LinkedIn: Site Director and Senior Technical Recruiter.

About Roku

• Roku is an American public company, one of the leading video streaming platforms in the United States, which also makes set-top boxes and televisions using its own Roku OS.

• Roku was founded by former Netflix vice president Anthony Wood in 2002. The company started as a division of Netflix Inc. The latter has invested $5.7 million in Roku.
• The United States is the main market for Roku Inc. In addition, the company is also present in Canada, United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, and some Latin American countries.
• Roku surpassed Samsung in the number of installed operating systems in the United States in 2020.
• In the first quarter of 2021, the company reported revenue of $492.9 million. Roku has 38% of the US streaming-media player market.
• Roku has eleven offices in the US, the UK, Denmark, and China.

Products and clients of the startup

The paper toothbrush is Effa’s most famous product; the team has won contests with it, and Reuters, DW, and other media outlets have written about it. According to Daria, Effa’s goal is to replace disposable products with environmentally friendly ones. The startup is prioritising the promotion of its toothbrushes: everyone brushes their teeth every day, and such a product is the easiest way to explain what the startup does and strives for.

The main clients of the startup are companies from the travel industry (hotels, airlines, cruise ships), but there are also clients from the corporate sector, such as Netflix, who need these toothbrushes for employees in offices.

“We also work with institutional or government procurement – for hospitals, refugee camps, and prisons. This segment will open for us in the future when production volumes allow us to reduce the product price, but we are already communicating with several social organizations (UNICEF and others),” says Daria.

The startup makes regular deliveries to its big clients every three months: to do this, Effa works with distributors in the regions where their clients are located. They pick up the product from the warehouses and distribute it themselves.

How it acquired Netflix as a client

According to Daria, the team managed to enter the market with the product at the right time. On the one hand, the coronavirus has caused an increase in the demand for single-use products. On the other hand, almost all the world’s industries are now switching to eco-products. The co-founder of the startup says that both the design and the product website are important. While studying in the Startup Wise Guys accelerator program, the team completed a module on lead generation and sales on Linkedin and now uses its lessons.

The fact that the startup participated in international projects like the eco-innovation competition Clim@ in Frankfurt, where it made the top five, the ClimateLaunchPad green business ideas competition, and so on, also helped it find clients. That, in turn, resulted in publications in the media.

“A separate sales tool is, of course, the media. As soon as a good article about us is published by a reputable media outlet, we are bombarded with letters,” says Daria.

That is how the startup got Netflix as a client. According to the co-founder of the startup, Netflix representatives were interested in the Effa product themselves: they were looking for an environmentally friendly solution for their offices, and the only alternatives available on the market were bamboo toothbrushes, which are not very environmentally friendly. They found articles about the Ukrainian startup and decided to get in touch with it.

As a result, Netflix bought the toothbrushes not only for the offices but also for actors on castings. It turned out that the company uses about 6,000 toothbrushes a month for these purposes. So after negotiations, the startup started supplying the brushes not only to offices but also to Netflix movie sets.

How Marriott became a client

As with Marriott, the startup tried to sell its product to hotels. Daria is responsible for sales, and it was she who negotiated with Marriott. In this case, LinkedIn worked well as a sales channel. As Daria says, to sell through this social media, you need to follow several basic steps:

• The person who will be engaged in sales through LinkedIn has to develop their profile: a good photo, position in the company, the profile of which should also be active.
• You need to be active on LinkedIn, read and understand the area of sales, subscribe to opinion shapers in this area, read specialized media, write posts, and like the posts of others. “This is the only way you will become an insider of a specific area. In a couple of weeks of working through a specific market segment on LinkedIn, you will realize that there are actually not so many key people there,” says Daria.
• You need to subscribe to online events: according to Daria, this is one of the best sales pipelines: after all, people who actively use LinkedIn subscribe to online events and are ready to share their opinions and expertise. You can see the list of event visitors and add them to your friends list.
• After researching the market, you need to find a person in the company who should write about sales. Writing to CEO is often a bad idea; such messages will just get lost. “It’s important to think about whose problematic aspects in the company you are solving,” says Daria. You shouldn’t become friends without a small intro message. And don’t try to sell your product straight away. You’d rather ask the person for their opinion about the product, ask a few questions.
• You should not add many people at once if your profile isn’t properly built: the algorithms of LinkedIn are configured in such a way that if too many users don’t accept your request, your profile may be blocked.
• First, it’s better to work with leads manually to understand how it all works. And after that, you can try lead generation software. “The main thing is to remember that after the first reply to your message, you need to proceed to correspondence via email or assign a call. The next thing is correct account management,” advises Daria.

In the case of Marriott, this was the approach that worked. Daria actively developed her LinkedIn and company profiles, made posts, and got likes. She also studied the market and those things that were important particularly to this company. And it turned out that sustainability (environmentally friendly and self-sufficient development) was one of the main goals of Marriott for the years 2021-2025, and the company started giving priority to microsuppliers of products. “This was a sign for us that we urgently needed to contact them,” states Daria.

She determined who might be responsible for purchasing products in the company and mailed outa number of letters referring to the post on microsuppliers. As soon as the manager of The Jaffa Hotel (part of the Marriott chain) in Israel responded, he was sent an email with a customized presentation, and then a call was made. After the call, we sent the client a PR package of 10 hotel-branded brushes. And we signed a contract with one of the Marriott hotels.

“When a client sees that their brand respected so much, the price is no longer so important to them,” says Daria.

The startup recently raised a round and plans to spend the funds to develop other eco-products.

As ITC.UA reports, these are real shares, just like those listed on foreign exchanges. So you can invest in them and receive dividends.

In total, stocks of 14 foreign issuers are available on PFTS

The cost of shares of these six companies that became available on the PFTS Stock Exchange is:

• Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) — ₴7,581
• Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) — ₴2,324
• Visa Inc. (V) — ₴6,532
• Tesla Inc (TSLA) — ₴21,763
• Netflix Inc (NFLX) — ₴15,974
• Facebook Inc (FB) — ₴8,938

In addition to these companies, shares of eight other foreign issuers are also available on the PFTS Stock Exchange:

• Apple (AAPL)
• Biz Finance (201003920)
• Blackrock Fund Advisers (TLT)
• Equity Residential (EQR)
• Ferrexpro (FXPO, a Ukrainian company but traded on the London Stock Exchange)
• MHP (MHPC, a Ukrainian company but listed on the London Stock Exchange)
• State Street Global Advisors Trust Company (SPY)
• US Department of the Treasury (US9128283)

According to the law, in order to buy securities on the stock exchange, you need to contact an intermediary – an investment company or a broker.

There are the following ones:

• shares of Tesla, Inc. (ISIN code – US88160R1014)
• shares of Facebook Inc. (ISIN code – US30303M1027)
• shares of Netflix Inc. (ISIN code – US64110L1061)
• shares of Microsoft Corporation (ISIN code – US5949181045)
• shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (ISIN code – US5949181045)
• shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc
• shares of Visa, Inc. (ISIN code – US92826C8394)

The corresponding decisions were published on the website of the Commission on December 8.

To recap, in 2017, new rules of the NBU came into force, according to which Ukrainian citizens can officially invest up to $50,000 per year abroad from their Ukrainian bank account. Since then, under these rules, Ukrainians have already bought shares in Facebook.

• Netflix has a program of cooperation with studios around the world: they create subtitles and dubbing in different languages for the content. To participate in this program, a studio must meet Netflix’s requirements and to apply. Standards include product quality, health care, working conditions, etc.
• The Ukrainian post-production studios have not been Netflix partners before. Now the list includes even two of them: Postmodern Postproduction and Tak Treba Production.
• Tak Treba Production, in particular, dubbed movies and TV shows ordered by Ukrainian TV channels, movies for distribution like The Hunger Games. Postmodern Postproduction mainly provides a dubbing of movies for cinema. It worked on Deadpool 2, The First Player to Prepare, It.

“When I started the company, I had $3,000 on me and a strong desire to develop the technology.”

One of the first projects turned out with the studio 20th Century Fox. Then Apple demanded that the iTunes video must be presented as on the DVDs of those times: with the ability to look at the sections, and that each section had an illustration – a small picture, and that it was a frame in FullHD. To sell films on iTunes, the studio had to update these pictures, and replace them with pictures of good quality.

“The problem from an engineer’s point of view was stupid, but it was serious as for a company, after all, they didn’t have databases, nothing that would have fixed which frame was used. This way they had a man looking for these shots manually. I made them a prototype of a program that finds identical frames in 10 minutes. Then information about us went around the word of mouth market, and we began to be mentioned in the movie credits,” – says Zhukov.

Since then, according to the founder of the project, almost all Hollywood studios have been among the customers at the startup. The main service that the company sells is programs that can recover videos of poor quality and make them 4K video quality. Their technology is used in CBS films, Sony Pictures now. The team cannot tell about many films because of the terms of the contract. But Alexander explained the details of a recent major project – working with Netflix.

Photo: California office

In the 70s of the last century the famous American director Orson Welles began working on the film The Other Side of the Wind, however, he passed away before he could finish it. Netflix decided to restore the film on the available materials. The director left only a workprint behind, which is a finished film, but of poor quality on an 8 mm film, and about 100 hours of shooting of excellent quality on a 35 mm film. Accordingly, the task was to compare the frames on a low-quality film with all the frames of a high-quality recording, and to collect a similar sequence of frames, but from a 35-mm film.

This is a frame-by-frame comparison was partly made by Netflix manually. There were 300,000 frames on poor quality 8 mm film, and 8.5 million ones on high-quality 35 mm, so they had to do about 2 trillion comparisons. Manually it is almost impossible to do this, Alexander notes. In Netflix, six people worked on this, and they managed to pick up 5% of the film. In terms of speed, it was clear that it would take 9 months to complete a full manual recovery. At this stage they decided to contact the Ukrainian company. Videogorillas patented the AI ​​algorithm BigFoot which compares the frames back in 2013 already. This technology was used in solving this problem.

In 2.5 minutes, from 21:30 – 23:57, the principals involved in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND discuss the role of Video Gorillas in matching reference print frames back to the original scanned negative.

2 trillion frame compares: what would take 9 months in human effort took 2 days.

— Alejandro Adams (@richesofchaos) November 4, 2018

“We made the whole film in 2.5 days and spent two more weeks checking the correctness of the algorithm, we really wanted to leave a good impression,” – says Zhukov.

The film was released on November 2 of this year, the Ukrainian company is mentioned in the credits:

Netflix also told about and showed Videogorillas’ contribution to the restoration of the film on the video, which is devoted to creating The Other Side of the Wind (to watch A Final Cut For Orson: 40 Years in The Making, you need to register on Netflix, it is talked about the work of Ukrainian studio from 21:30 to 23:57 minutes).

The BigFoot algorithm allows restoring other movies and TV shows that were made decades ago to 4K quality. On average, people spend about $300,000 – $420,000 to restore one film in this format. Zhukov doesn’t name exact prices for his services, however, he notes that the average price Videogorillas take for the project from the studios is ten times less than the cost of manual processing.

Now there are 15 people working in the studio and it makes a profit, although the management does not name specific figures. “We have been earning money for a long time, and I am proud that we did not take money from anyone, did not attract investments, never were in debt, did not take loans. Our story can’t get more bootstrap,” – says Zhukov.

Videogorillas now have plans to work pro bono. The company usually does not work with Ukrainian studios, but the management wants to offer the Film Studio named after O. Dovzhenko to restore for free the film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” in the same way.

“Posters like “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” of 1964 now in 4K format on big screens” is a reality, and we have a ready solution for this,” – says Zhukov.

Finally, for those who are interested in the technical side of the company’s developments, here is a recent report by Oles Petriv at the AI Ukraine Conference: