Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Billion Dollar Code’ On Netflix, About The German Developers Who Sued Over The Google Earth Algorithm

We always hear about the “winners” in the world of high tech: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, etc. But for every winner, there are lots of “losers”; the people who blazed the trail for the others to ruthlessly make billions from their efforts. The Billion Dollar Code is based on a true story about the founders of a company who sued Google over the algorithm used on Google Earth.

THE BILLION DOLLAR CODE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Archival scenes of various computer technologies over the decades, from the Z22 Electronic Calculator all the way through the introduction of the iPad.

The Gist: In 2014, the German software company ART+COM sued Google, claiming that the search behemoth used code from their product Terravision to create Google Earth. In the four-part series The Billion Dollar Code, viewers go back and forth between a 2017 deposition for the case, where middle-aged versions of artist Carsten Schlüter (Mark Waschke) and hacker Juri Müller (Misel Maticevic) give their testimony, and the 1993-94 time period when the two met and invented their revolutionary software.

Back in 1993 Berlin, Carsten (Leonard Scheicher) was a digital artist who displayed his programmed art in clubs and as a graduate project. His professors weren’t impressed with the jaggy, crashing program — one calls it “Pac-Man shit”. But Juri (Marius Ahrendt), a reclusive programmer who was in a well-known hacker collective, sees Carsten’s graphics at a club and approached the artist, telling him how much he liked it — and how he could fix their problems and make them better.

When Juri invites Carsten to visit him at the hacker collective, the two end up bonding about their common love of technology, and Juri shows him just what machine can make his graphics smoother — a Onyx RealityEngine by Silicon Graphics — by showing him a smooth-spinning graphic of the earth. That night, Carsten thinks of the idea artistically, conceiving the ability to zoom from the globe graphic all the way down to a particular neighborhood.

To get the funding to obtain the computing power they’ll need, the pair need to approach megacorporation Deutsche Telekom, who was funding lots of new technology at the time. Desperate to land the funding, Carsten promises that the software will be ready for a conference in Kyoto one year away. They put together a team that consists of both the hacker collective and Carsten’s artist friends, but Juri, under pressure to find a solution to a problem that’s never been examined before, almost cracks when he can’t get the software to work with only weeks left and DT wanting to see a working beta.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It could be said that The Billion Dollar Code is similar to The Social Network, but the first episode plays out very similarly to the early episodes of Halt And Catch Fire, with some nerdily funny elements of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley thrown in for good measure.

Our Take: Creators Oliver Ziegenbalg and Robert Thalheim told Variety that they wanted to pattern the story of The Billion Dollar Code on the “beautiful losers” of the ART+COM-Google case, and that angle is what distinguishes the show from other “computer nerds change the world” stories we’ve seen. In far too many cases, we see the “winners” in the history of high tech, stories about the Gateses, Jobses and Zuckerbergs. But, as the creators said, who wouldn’t want to see the story of the Winklevosses, people who got screwed out of the riches and power by people who were more ruthless than they were?

The history of high tech is littered with those stories, which is why seeing the story from the “losers” perspective is so refreshing. Yes, Silicon Valley gave us that view, but they were playing the story of Pied Piper more as a satire of the tech world than anything else. The Billion Dollar Code plays into Carsten and Juri’s idealistic mission, giving them respect instead of derision.

A shorthanded way to see this is during the deposition scenes, where Google’s attorney, Eric Spears (Seumas F. Sargent) is all threatening bluster, but ART+COM’s attorney, Lea Hauswirth (Lavinia Wilson) is pretty confident that she has Google running scared. Those scenes give the ’90s scenes a bit of context, showing just how naively idealistic people like Carsten and Juri were back then (and, to be honest, now). Their young selves accurately represent people who had a vision and wrote software looking to make that vision come to life, not for riches, power or fame.

Scheicher and Ahrendt embody young Carsten and Juri with equal parts dignity, scruffy optimism and a bit of guilelessness. Hopefully, as Terravision gets more attention, we’ll see what happens when they get swept into the Silicon Valley madness, with venture capitalists and others wanting pieces of their souls. When they intersect with Google, it’ll be interesting to see how the creators show Google’s alleged “theft” (a court in Delaware said that ART+COM could not prove infringement, a decision held up by an appeals court).

Are there some predicable moments of dramatic license in the first episode? Absolutely. It’s hard to dramatize the software development process, so there’s always “eureka” moments added to the narrative that likely never happened that way. But there’s more than enough tech talk to make computer geeks like us satisfied that the writers did their due diligence. We weren’t rolling our eyes as we watched, which is always a good sign of a tech-oriented story is being told the right way.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After seeing Google Earth and Terravision side by side, Hauswirth asks the middle-aged Carsten how they could be so identical? “Because we were naive,” he replies, “and we made a mind-boggling mistake.”

Sleeper Star: Waschke and Maticevic have the thankless task of playing the older Carsten and Juri, whose scenes will be mostly testimony, either during the deposition or the trial. But they do a good job of playing them as older, wiser and a bit more jaded, but still essentially the same two characters.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some of the scenes during the evening Carsten and Juri first hang out together felt like a first date montage in a romantic comedy. Maybe that’s done on purpose. But it was a bit, um, strange to us.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Billion Dollar Code is about two guys who wanted to truly change the world, and felt that they were with Terravision. But it’s also a lesson in how the first to do something might not be the ones who make the most money doing it (just ask the founders of Yahoo, or the developers of Alta Vista). It’s a story well-told and worth paying attention to.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Billion Dollar Code On Netflix