Viswanathan K's Thoughts

This blog is based on a mathematical equation that took down a multi-billion dollar industry. But fear not, I won’t bore you with the equation. But I still hope to help explain how that equation did that. Sound impossible? But hey, didn’t Richard Feynman introduce his QED theory to the public by saying: “It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it.” So, at the risk of sounding (very) arrogant, I’ll attempt what Feynman said. The equation in question is called the Fourier transform. Jamie Condliffe wrote this awesome article explaining it. His one line non-technical description of it: “Complicated signals could be represented by simply adding up a series of far simpler ones.” That’s it. That’s all the maths we need to know for this blog! Really. That maths is the heart of the MP3 format used for music files in the digital age. Simply put, MP3 applies the Fourier transform on a music file to break the “complicated signal” (aka the son...

When a new season of that TV serial you like comes just once a week, isn’t it frustrating? You want to see the next episode, but it’s 7 days away, and by then, you lose the flow… That is why Netflix, the company that streams movies to your device, tried an interesting experiment: they released the entire season of its original programming serial all at once. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, pointed out that the same thing happened 200 years back, with, hold your breath, books! Back then, fiction was written for magazines, one chapter per issue. But once it became economically viable to print books, you got all the chapters at one shot! Hastings feels TV content is headed the same way: the “serialized release model” may be nearing its end. Another advantage Hastings sees with the new model is, again, what happened with books: variable sized chunks. After all, chapters in a book are of variable size, so why can’t episode lengths in the new system, “depending on the natural rhy...