Mark Rober has spent nearly a year treating Netflix as a second engine for his Crunch Labs brand. The former NASA engineer and YouTube creator says his Netflix catalogue pulled 104.8M viewing hours globally between 2025 and mid-2026, equal to 53 million views. The next test is his first big original: Schooled, a competition series scheduled for early 2027.
Schooled is a scaled-up engineering playground
Rober described the format as a real school turned into an engineering competition. Fourteen kids, split into seven teams of two and aged 9 to 17, face science or engineering challenges each episode. The winner gets $500,000 for college and an apprenticeship with Rober at Crunch Labs. Netflix is producing the show with Jimmy Kimmel’s Kimmelot.
The production is also a jump in scale. Rober said he built his YouTube career largely alone, but the Netflix set had around 300 people a day.
Netflix made the move a “yes-and”
Rober’s Netflix slate rolled out quickly:
- August 2025: the partnership begins as Netflix adds marquee internet creators.
- 2025: Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs enters the Kids Top 10 in dozens of countries.
- December 2025: Elmo and Mark Rober’s Merry Giftmas arrives.
- Summer 2026: Camp CrunchLabs lands.
- Early 2027: Schooled debuts.
Rober calls the YouTube-to-Netflix expansion a “yes-and” rather than a substitution. The Netflix relationship opened doors such as working with Sesame Street and funding an original that he said would have been difficult to finance alone. He also said he remains a YouTuber at his core, with large YouTube projects still ahead.
Why it matters for the screen business
The most useful detail is not the format; it is the funnel. Rober confirmed that Netflix reach has already driven meaningful interest in Crunch Labs physical STEM kits. That makes the streaming catalogue a top-of-funnel engine for owned commerce, not just a licensing line.
Rober also said Schooled will skip traditional polished editing and break the fourth wall more than a typical network show. The reason is audience behaviour: creator viewers want authenticity, and overly clean formats often underperform when they move to streaming.
For streaming marketers, the early data point is clear. A curated creator library can deliver 53 million views before a single original episode arrives. That is a strong argument for treating creators as long-term franchises rather than one-off programming experiments.
Source: What’s on Netflix
