Netflix started using the "Skip intro" button about five years ago, since 2017, to maximize users' time whenever they went to watch series. In other words, for the streaming giant, it became pointless to waste time watching the same introductions every time one went to watch the series.

So, says the newsmagazine (via Netflix), that the button is used 136 million times a day. On average, you save about five minutes with series introductions. Far from imagining it, this has already led to Netflix subscribers saving 195 years of time that would have been taken up by series openings.

The idea to develop the button came to Netflix's Director of Product Innovation, Cameron Johnson, when he was watching the series "Game of Thrones", which despite having an epic introduction, is quite long. In his view, this breaks the immersion of the story.

Johnson notes that "it was frustrating trying to manually jump to the right moment at the beginning of the episode," pointing out that sometimes it would advance too far and at other times not far enough. It was this experience that made the executive think of a way to improve the experience for service members.

After some research, "we noticed that users preferred to skip the introductions."

"In 15% of the cases, the members were moving forward in time within the first five minutes of the show," he said.

After several iterations of the feature, Netflix decided to roll out the button on just 250 series in the US, UK and Canada, and noting "great member buy-in," the company eventually rolled out the option across all TVs and mobile devices it was available on in August 2017.