Netflix says that the world saves 195 years in a day just by 'skipping intro'

• Netflix has revealed that users on its platform click the ‘skip intro’ button 136 million times a day.
• The company went ahead with the ‘Skip Intro’ button after it noticed that about one in seven Netflix users were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes.
• The company had initially added the ‘Skip Intro’ button in only 250 series in the US, UK and Canada.

Netflix has revealed that its users click the ‘skip intro’ button 136 million times a day, saving up 195 years in cumulative time.

The video streaming platform in a report released on Thursday noted that about one in seven Netflix users were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. This gave them a push towards the idea of introducing the skip forward and backward button.

“An idea was floated to add skip forward and skip backward buttons in 10-second increments. The reason to offer a skip back 10 seconds was obvious: maybe you got distracted and missed a particular moment,” Cameron Johnson, Director Product Innovation - Studio Product Management at Netflix, said in the statement.

However, they still could not derive a valid conclusion as to why members would need a skip forward button on an over-the-top (OTT) platform. But Game of Thrones’ famously long “and beautiful” opening credits sequence gave Johnson a reason.

“I found the show so compelling that I wanted to skip the credits and jump right into the story, and I found it frustrating to try to manually jump forward to just the right place. Sometimes I would jump too far, and sometimes I would jump too short. I wondered whether other people felt the same,” he noted.

The company had initially added the ‘Skip Intro’ button in only 250 series in US, UK and Canada. The feature was only available on the web and not the app. After a positive response, the company added the ‘Skip Intro’ button on TV in August 2017 and mobile in May next year.

Netflix is currently among the biggest OTT platforms in the world with over 221.8 million users. The company competes with the likes of Amazon Prime with approximately 150 million users. Notably, Disney has 174 million subscribers across Disney+. ESPN and Hulu.

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