Last month, Matt Lyzell, the creator of the Netflix interactive series Battle Kitty announced on his personal Instagram account that Netflix was going to remove his show from the streaming service just two years after its debut. By the end of the day, Netflix confirmed that not only Battle Kitty was being removed, but that all 24 Netflix interactive series were to be removed on December 1, with the exception of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls, and You vs. Wild.
“The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas,” a Netflix spokesperson told 404 Media at the time.
It is normal for Netflix and other streaming services to rotate titles in and out of their catalogue depending on what they cost to license and host and how many subscriptions they drive to the platform, but Netflix removing its interactive series means that, as original Netflix creations, once they are removed from Netflix they will not be available anywhere else, and they are a new and unique format that dozens of producers, animators, voice actors, and other creatives have finished work on very recently.
Unwilling to accept Netflix’s decision to make all these interactive shows totally inaccessible, a group of fans—and, in a few cases, people who worked on the interactive shows—are finding ways to archive and make them available for free.
“I couldn’t let this work go to waste. We’re talking about over 100 hours of video and ~ one thousand hours of dubbing,” Pixel, one of the archivists in a Discord channel archiving Netflix interactive shows, told me.
On Discord, dozens of users have collaborated on capturing all the videos from Netflix before they were removed, as well as reverse engineering how the platform handled their interactive elements. Some shows are already fully emulated and can be streamed in bespoke, alternative players, others are uploaded to YouTube in a series of daisy-chained, interlinked videos that recreate a very similar interactive experience, while some others have been uploaded as non-interactive videos.
404 Media agreed not to name the Discord channel and some of the places where the Netflix interactive archives are being hosted so Pixel could talk about the archiving effort. While Netflix has made it so there is no way to view Netflix interactive shows without basically pirating them, the archivists worry that the company will still try to take down any alternative method for viewing them.
“While I can’t disclose fully how we are archiving these, I can say that they pull directly from Netflix’s servers, so no re-encoding or loss of quality,” Pixel said. “I would love to talk more about how it works, but it risks Netflix patching out the tool entirely.”
Netflix interactives, in case you are unfamiliar, are choose-your-own-adventure videos where the viewer can make choices at the end of a scene that determine how the story unfolds. This Netflix initiative was launched with great fanfare in 2018 when Netflix released Bandersnatch, an interactive entry in the science-fiction anthology series Black Mirror. The shows are interactive in the sense that viewers can nudge the story in different directions, but all they are doing is essentially deciding which pre-recorded video file will play next. Netflix actually made some of its interactive series available on YouTube by using YouTube’s built-in feature that allows users to choose what video to play next once a video ends, daisy chaining YouTube videos together to create the choose-your-own-adventure format natively on that platform. I’ve seen at least two other Netflix interactive shows fully recreated by archivists on YouTube with this method, sometimes in multiple languages.
Pixel explained that Netflix interactives rely on an “internal video” that contains all the interactive elements, including the different paths, variations, and endings. Decisions viewers make are defined by two JSON files, with one determining when a viewer is presented with a decision and and where in the internal video file to skip to based on that decision, and the other pulling the assets for the decision buttons from Netflix’s servers.
“We currently have a proof-of-concept emulator running off a python script that uses the jsons to make functioning decisions, although it needs ironing out and button images are broken as of now,” Pixel said. “We have a member of the team in Turkey that is hosting the files for once we get the emulator working on a webpage.”
While the archivists in the Discord were able to rip much of the content directly from Netflix before it was removed, each title is available in many languages, and as Pixel explained, they had trouble grabbing some of the interactive elements, so they weren’t able to grab everything.
In at least one case I’ve seen, the archivists shared video of one of the interactive shows pulled from Netflix that was uploaded to the personal account of someone who worked on the show, though Pixel said they've already ripped that show directly from Netflix.
“Since it's no longer on the Netflix app I figured why not upload it here as a lot of crazy talented people poured their hearts into it for a year,” the person who worked on the show said in a post sharing the video.
When I asked what the biggest challenge facing the archiving effort is at the moment, Pixel said that “Right now it’s probably keeping track of everything hah. Me and Scramble [another person involved in the archiving effort] had to contact a bunch of people who were willing to help rip stuff/give us already discontinued shows. Right now it’s the emulator. We have a lot of people counting on us and I get a LOT of dms from people asking how to play them haha.”
Correction: This story previously said the archivists used video that was uploaded by one of the show's creators. The archivists say they had already ripped that show directly from Netflix. 404 Media regrets the error.
