‘The Town Hall of Hollywood.’ Welcome to the Netflix Lobby.
Dolly Parton recently held court there, big wig and all. Leonardo DiCaprio and John Kerry arrived at the same time last month. Cindy Crawford on the left, David Letterman on the right. And isn’t that Beyoncé by the espresso bar?
Welcome to the hottest see-and-be-seen spot in Hollywood: Netflix’s first-floor waiting room.
Scratch that. It’s a “lobby experience” and “creative gateway,” according to a design firm that worked on the space.
Netflix declined to comment for this article, but insiders say that about 300 guests come through the lobby for meetings on an average day: agents, publicists, writers, producers, directors, stars — many hoping for a piece of the roughly $8 billion the streaming service spends on original content annually, some with projects already in the works.
The new lobby has multiple showpieces. Rows of Emmy and Oscar statuettes glisten in glass cabinets at its center. There is an installation involving 110 individually programmed video screens of different sizes (iPad, iPhone, laptop). But the pièce de résistance is the 80-foot video screen. Mr. Sarandos came up with the idea.
The Netflix video wall, 46 million pixels in two layers, was designed to make footage of sets appear hyper-real, as if guests stepped inside the film or show. To accomplish the visual trick, one layer of pixels creates the environment — the prison cafeteria from “Orange is the New Black,” for instance — and a second layer adds subtle and periodic movements called “sprites,” like steam rising from the cafeteria’s soup pots.
See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/business/media/netflix-lobby-hollywood.html