Five years after rolling out the feature, Netflix found that the users clicked the 'Skip Intro' button 13.6 crore times a day, saving up 195 years in cumulative time.
The video streaming platform said the 'Skip Intro' feature was just a glimmer of an idea six years ago.
Netflix Director of Product Innovation, Cameron Johnson, “An idea 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.”
The company could not spot a compelling reason to introduce the skip forward button. 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 manually jump forward to just the right place,” Johnson said.
Netflix’s research found that 15 per cent of the time users were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes.
The company had initially added the ‘Skip Intro’ button to only 250 series (excluding films) in the US, the UK and Canada. It was available only on the web.
Later, Netflix rolled out the feature on TV in August 2017 and mobile in May next year.