Profile of Carla Engelbrecht, the director of product innovation at Netflix, whose experiments with interactive kids programs were a precursor to Bandersnatch
EARLIER THIS YEAR, Carla Engelbrecht flew to Phoenix, sat on the couch in a stranger's living room, and observed the stranger watching … See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Engelbrecht's profile lands at the midpoint of a documented arc: her team's interactive kids episodes tested on smart TVs, Roku, and iOS in 2017 proved viewers would tap through branching stories, and eighteen months of development on Twine turned that into Bandersnatch, Netflix's first choose-your-own-storyline film.
The piece also sits inside a longer kids-content logic — back in 2015 Netflix and Amazon were already racing to hook young viewers with high-quality originals — and ahead of Netflix's later push into games, where it acquired Ready Player Me for cross-game avatars while cutting internal games staff and closing Night School Studio.
First-order effects
- Engelbrecht's couch-side research in Phoenix is the validation layer behind Bandersnatch: the profile shows Netflix committing adult-facing interactive titles only after the kids' experiments de-risked the format.
- Her director-of-product-innovation role makes her one of the named owners of whether branching video stays a novelty or becomes standard Netflix tooling.
Second-order effects
- Netflix's subsequent games moves — Ready Player Me avatars alongside job cuts and the Night School Studio closure — suggest the interactive playbook is being absorbed into a leaner, partner-driven games strategy rather than a large internal studio build-out.
- Rivals watching the kids-first-to-adult-format pipeline face pressure to treat children's catalogs as format R&D rather than just subscriber-acquisition content.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming differentiation shifts from catalog volume toward interaction formats pioneered on kids' screens, with the 2015 Netflix–Amazon kids arms race as its origin point.
- Interactive storytelling pushes streaming platforms closer to game-industry structures — authoring tools like Twine, avatar economies, external studios — blurring the line between a TV service and a games platform.
The trend: Streaming platforms are using children's programming as their R&D lab for new formats, then scaling whatever works across the whole catalog.