iWorld
Know the story behind Netflix’s ‘skip intro’ button
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.
iWorld
Veto onboards B4U Network channels to boost its entertainment offering
Partnership adds films, music and regional fare as platform sharpens its large-screen pitch
NEW DELHI: Veto is stacking its content deck. The family-first CTV-focused OTT platform has onboarded B4U Network, plugging in a slate of Bollywood, music and regional programming to widen its appeal in India’s living rooms.
The tie-up brings B4U Movies, B4U Music, B4U Kadak and Bhojpuri+ onto Veto, offering a broader mix of films, songs and vernacular content aimed at diverse audience cohorts. The move is designed to deepen engagement and nudge growth as competition in connected TV heats up.
Ritu Dhawan, managing director, Veto, framed the partnership as a scale play. “At Veto, our vision is to redefine large-screen entertainment for Indian households by creating a trusted, free, and unified viewing experience. Partnering with B4U Network strengthens our ability to offer deeply engaging and regionally relevant content, helping us connect more with audiences across India,” Dhawan said. “As we grow, our focus remains on delivering relevant, high-quality entertainment that families can enjoy together.”
The integration is expected to expand Veto’s audience base while improving content discovery and depth. The platform positions itself as a no-login, large-screen-first service, bundling live TV, news, sports, movies, music, podcasts and on-demand programming into a single interface tailored for connected TVs.
As streaming fragments and screens multiply, Veto is betting on aggregation and simplicity. More content, fewer clicks, broader reach—the pitch is clear, and the living room is the battleground.
