A more accessible blog post, also from Netflix, mentioned in the article: https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-a-storys-future-with-...

Interesting to read this to see the Netflix perspective. My intro to colour management came from digital photography approx ten years ago, where the goal was 'ensure that colours in printed pictures look the same when printed as they do on the screen'.

Printing introduces an additional complexity to the already complex situation described in the OP. Specifically printers have different primary colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) to screens (red, green and blue) and colour is subtractive, so that adding all the colours makes darker results, unlike screens, where increasing the red, green and blue ultimately makes white (actually printers have to add black - the 'Key' in CMYK - to get true black). The colour management and calibration issues are conceptually similar, though.

I recently found this guide on the fundamentals of color management very helpful. https://hg2dc.com/

What would it be like if our monitors had ambient light sensors so that they could calibrate their color balance to the surrounding room? The human eye tends to "calibrate" itself based on the average of the scene it's observing, so if you really wanted images to look the same on every display you would have to take that into account.