Isn’t it always the little things that matter? For instance, that non-stop, unplanned road trip with our friends or that moment when you helped the grandma to cross the road. Those Netflix and chill nights with your better half and that life-saving option to skip the intro part and jump directly to our favorite part of the episode. Wait, did you know how the skip intro button came into existence? No, it didn’t fall from a tree, hit the mega minds of people behind the streaming service, and hinted at them to introduce the ‘skip intro’ button to the audience.

It was a gradual process, a thorough analysis, and a lot of research resulted in the formation of that heavenly tiny pop-up. If you are a real fan of the streaming giant, you would surely want to know the entire story. And here we have served you with the exact thing.

Here’s how it all started at Netflix

When we get a successful outcome or result, all of us tend to look back and celebrate how it all started at first. A small idea while driving or doing something bizarre might do wonders for us. And such is the case of Netflix’s Director of Production Invention. In his article ‘Looking Back on the Origin of ‘Skip Intro’ Five Years Later,’ Cameron Johnson mentions how this idea popped up in his brain while watching the extensive opening scene of Game of Thrones.

Apparently, facing difficulty to fast forward to the exact time resulted in this brilliant idea. He wrote, “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.”

A research later on found that 15% of the time members manually forwarded the show within its 5 minutes of streaming. That is, they skipped the intro part. This boosted the creators’ confidence, and they formulated a planned strategy for the same.

So what was the goal and how did they manage to achieve it?

The goal here was simple. To provide the viewer with the flexibility to either skip the intro or enjoy it throughout. Further, they wanted it to operate on a single click and appear on the screens only when needed. “Rather than build a general purpose solution that might help a little with several different needs, like a skip forward 10 seconds button, we designed a single purpose solution that did only one thing really well,” wrote the director. You can operate it simply by pressing S on your keyboard.

The feature was initially launched in 250 series, excluding the films, in US, UK, and Canada. Among many other names suggested such as ‘Jump Past Credits,’ ‘Skip Credits,’ ‘Jump Ahead,’ ‘Skip Intro’ and simply ‘Skip,’ Skip Intro worked extremely well. The very simple but intelligent idea got a lot of engagement and appreciation on social media. An engineer fascinatingly wrote, “I’m not sure that if you put a button that said ‘free cupcake’ that it would get more clicks than ‘Skip Intro.’” The feature was launched globally in 2017.

The Director expressed his gratitude

Cameron Johnson expressed his gratitude saying, “Over the past five years, it’s been gratifying to see ‘Skip Intro’ become a beloved feature adopted by many other streaming services, bringing a little moment of delight to audiences around the world.”

A scintilla that aroused six years back has now become fan favorite. Almost no series is watched without using the ‘skip intro’ feature. “On Netflix in a typical day, the ‘Skip Intro’ button is pressed 136 million times, saving members an astonishing 195 years in cumulative time!” Indeed, a huge success. Let us hope that the streaming service continues to thrive in such manner eternally.

Do let us know in the comment section how much relief do you feel having the ‘skip intro’ feature right on your screens.