Mumbai: Streaming major Netflix, in a blog post, revealed that its ‘skip intro’ is pressed 136 million times in a typical day by its members. The platform claims that the feature has saved its members 195 years in cumulative time.

The germ of the idea was conceived six years ago by the Netflix team. The intention was to help members get the most out of their experience on the platform, it said.

“An idea was floated to add skip forward and skip backward buttons in 10-second increments,” stated Netflix director product innovation - studio product management Cameron Johnson. “The reason to offer a skip back 10 seconds was obvious: maybe you got distracted and missed a particular moment.”

“But why skip forward 10 seconds?” Netflix asked themselves. “Well, you might want to skip the opening credits. But no one could come up with any other compelling reasons,” said Johnson.

“At the same time, I was watching Game of Thrones, which has a famously long (and beautiful) opening credits sequence. 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 the 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 added.

Netflix research showed that 15 per cent of their members at the time were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. “This gave us confidence that a lot of people wanted to skip the intro,” noted Johnson.

Instead of building a general purpose solution that may help with several different needs, Netflix designed a single purpose solution that did one thing well.

A little known hack unknown to many Netflix users is that they can press the ‘s’ key on the keyboard to trigger the ‘skip intro’ feature without having to move the mouse.

“To find a name for the button, we brainstormed a few options including ‘Jump Past Credits,’ ‘Skip Credits,’ ‘Jump Ahead,’ ‘Skip Intro’ and simply ‘Skip’ and then started to test the feature with a random set of members,” recalled Johnson.

Netflix initially tested the feature on the web across 250 series excluding films in the US and Canada. According to an engineer, “I’m not sure that if you put a button that said ‘free cupcake’ that it would get more clicks than ‘Skip Intro.’”

“We quickly added ‘Skip Intro’ to TV in August 2017 and mobile in May of the following year. The rest is history,” said Johnson.