On Thursday, video distribution powerhouse Netflix announced its Netflix Cloud Prize contest, in which the company will hand out an award of $100,000 to developers who can come up with innovative ways for improving cloud computing.

Revealing that the prize money would go to developers who can work out better ways for the delivery of computing resources over the Internet, Netflix said that those "resources" would, obviously, include streaming video from the likes of Netflix itself. The prize-worthy inputs from the developers will help Netflix boost the cloud-computing reality through its OSS; thereby advancing in the direction of realizing its potential.

The Netflix Cloud Prize competition has ten categories in all, which challenge the developers to bring forth improvements in different cloud computing aspects, including security, reliability, and usability.

The competition opened to all entries on Thursday, and will end on September 15, after a six-month period. Once the competition has been closes to entries, the winners will be selected by a judging panel; and the announcements of the winners will be made on October 16. The awards will be given to the winners in November at the AWS Re: Invent in Las Vegas.

About the Netflix Cloud Prize, CPO Neil Hunt said that the contest will "improve understanding of what it takes to build native applications for the cloud that take full advantage of the opportunities for scalable computing."