5 years of the most used button in Netflix history | Technique

The legendary Skip Intro or Skip Intro button is a must on Netflix. We all would love to see our favorite series premiere once, but maybe after 8 seasons and 300 episodes, it might get a little heavy. Now this button is celebrating its fifth birthday.

Netflix claims it The button is pressed about 136 million times a dayproviding users around the world with a cumulative time of 195 years.

And even though Netflix is ​​24 years old, this button is celebrating its fifth birthday. Now, the platform itself has explained the history Skip creating intro.

In a blog post written by Cameron Johnson, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix, he talked about the team of engineers who were looking for something new to offer on the platform. The best idea they suggested was to move the series or movie back and forth by 10 seconds.

However, once this new feature is launched, It found that 15% of the time users were skipping episodes manually in the first five minutesreinforcing the idea that they don’t want to see the introduction.

in spite of that, Without that button to skip the intro, you had to be careful not to skip the beginning of the series, Accordingly, you have to watch a small part of the introduction. And surely there are a series of great openers like Game of Thrones or some that vary from season to season like Attack on the Titans, for example.

We also have The Simpsons case, which varies according to the episode or season. Whatever the case, we always want to skip the introduction.

With all this on the table, Netflix wanted to add something more specific. “Instead of building a general purpose solution that might help a little bit with many different needs, like a 10-second skip button, we built a single solution that did one thing really well”Johnson writes.

The team behind this feature has gone by various names, including “Jump Past Credits,” “Skip Credits,” “Jump Ahead,” and simply “Skip.” The company began testing it with random members in 2017, and the idea has been a huge hit with users, according to Johnson.

Naturally, Skip Intro was the best name of all and eventually became the winner. In the case of Spain, “delete the introduction”.

curiously, The button was only introduced for web version in 2017 And it was limited to only 250 series in the US, UK and Canada (movies were excluded). The button didn’t make it to TV until August 2017 and to mobile apps in May 2018.

Today might be something we don’t stop thinking about often and automatically click on, but it’s really a cool feature and today it’s 5 years, so they’re celebrating.