It has been five years since Netflix introduced the ‘Skip Intro’ button which allows users to skip the introduction of the series they are watching.
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Background
Cameron Johnson, Director Product Innovation – Studio Product Management at Netflix has penned a blog post detailing how the simple yet useful little feature came to be.
The company claims that on an average day the ‘Skip Intro’ button is pressed 136 million times, saving users 195 years in cumulative time.
This feature was not there from the beginning, but was developed after research and personal experiences.
Light Bulb Moment
Johnson wrote that the big idea came to him when he was watching Game of Thrones.
The uber popular series has a famously long opening credits sequence.
He said that he found the show very compelling and wanted to binge it but could not sit through the opening credits every episode.
He found it frustrating to try to manually jump forward to just the right place.
Sometimes he would jump ahead too far and sometimes too short.
Research Finds Many Takers
The company conducted a research and found that about 15% of the time members were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes.
In other words, one in seven Netflix users were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes.
It was at this point that the idea of ‘Skip Intro’ took shape.
Instead of building a general purpose solution that would cover different needs, they decided on a single purpose solution that did “only one thing really well”.
The intention was to make the function as simple as possible while also giving the user flexibility if they do want to sit through the opening credits.
As a result, the button would appear on screen only when needed and work with a single click.
Picking The Name
Several names to call the feature were considered.
‘Jump Past Credits,’ ‘Skip Credits,’ ‘Jump Ahead,’ ‘Skip Intro’ and simply ‘Skip’ were some of them.
Netflix ended up settling on the ‘Skip Intro’ as we know it today and can be found in several other OTT apps as well.
At first, Netflix rolled out the function to only 250 series in the US, UK, and Canada and only for the web version.
Arrival On Mobile
It was received very well and saw massive engagement with users.
The functionality was added for more users on TV in August 2017.
It came to mobile in May 2018 and the rest, as we know, is history.
Also, for those watching Netflix on the web, you can Skip Intro by simply pressing S.