Heavy Netflix users are very attached to their streaming service, and at Netflix's internal hackathon, the company is looking for new ways to literally attach its addictive video platform to users. Out of this year's Hack Day competition come several exciting new ideas that nevertheless may never make it to your living room.

Like many large IT companies such as Facebook, Netflix puts on competitions to encourage experimentation and spur innovation for its platform and services. While good ideas can come out of these hackathon events, for Netflix, "For Hack Day, our primary goal is to provide a fun, experimental, and creative outlet for our engineers. If something interesting and potentially useful comes from it, that is fine, but the real motivation is fun."

Netflix's "that is fine, but" attitude might be your primary source of disappointment when you hear about the ideas that came out of the most recent Hack Day, which wrapped up Friday morning. "It is not unusual for us to see a lot of really good ideas come from Hack Day, but last week we saw some really spectacular work," said Netflix's announcement. "The hackers generated a wide range of ideas on just about anything, including ideas to improve developer productivity, ways to help troubleshooting, funky data visualizations, and of course a diversity of product feature ideas."

Here's a rundown of some of the best new features that Netflix has been so unduly conscientious to remind us that, "while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or be used beyond Hack Day":

Netflix Beam

(Warning, the audio is sporadic and somewhat grating)


Netflix beam uses Apple's new iBeacon Bluetooth technology to share videos between iOS devices by using proximity -- no need to share WiFi passwords or deal with Netflix logins.

Custom Playlists


Like YouTube video playlists, Netflix Custom Playlists would allow multiple quick-queues based on themes or users. This function would be great for putting together a few hours of entertainment for kids on the spot, or setting up a one-time movie marathon. Just like the YouTube video playlists, you can skip forward and back between videos, and there's a reordering feature as well.

Pin Protected Profiles


Netflix profiles are great for families, but there's no protection to wall off viewing and using different profiles. So kids that are too old for Netflix "Just for Kids" section can easily log in to Mom or Dad's profile and see what they've been up to. In a more pedestrian case, your girlfriend might accidentally log in to your profile and watch a bunch of shows you hate -- leading to lots of annoying "Because you watched" categories popping up next time you sit down to veg. With Pin Protected Profiles, those problems are eliminated.

Sleep Tracking with : FitBit

So even if this feature were to come to market -- and, as we pointed out, Netflix cautions that there's a good chance none of these will -- only the most manic Netflix watchers would be able to take advantage of it.