How Netflix prepared itself for the House of Cards launch

Marketplace’s Queena Kim was in Netflix’s war room at the moment season 2 of House of Cards went live, getting a peek at how Netflix pulls off dropping an entire season of phenomenal television into our addled, impatient laps. Just thinking about that sudden rush of millions of fans clicking on the new season of HoC makes my head spin, yet they did it again without a hitch.

The new world of Internet TV is really geeky. I spent some time in the Netflix War Room last night, as the company debuted the new season of its smash hit TV series, House of Cards. The war room is a conference room with big table in the middle. And as we approached midnight, a bunch of engineers were couched over their laptops. Jeremy Edberg, Netflix’s Reliability Architect, was one of them. “So when the clock hits 12, the first thing I’m going to be doing is looking at our dashboards to see if anybody is playing the show,” Edberg said.