A closer look

Engineers at Netflix produced a bizarre short film featuring a man doing a monkey dance in a courtyard as the very first piece of original content uploaded to their streaming servers. Long before they were spending billions of dollars on glossy prestige dramas and true crime documentaries, the technical team needed a test video to check the streaming infrastructure. They shot random footage around their headquarters, resulting in an incredibly weird technical test that essentially launched the modern era of binge-watching. It is extremely funny to think that a platform dominating global culture and bankrupting legacy television networks owes its functional existence to an awkward tech bro dancing terribly in front of a digital camera. This weird little nugget of history proves that the absolute peak of human technological advancement is always initially used for premium nonsense