Netflix is one of those companies that thrive on their experiments and R&D team’s research in order to always be twenty steps ahead of any competition from the very start. They had already introduced one of the very favorites ‘Skip the Intro’ button, which have been praised the community for saving users time. Now they are going to introduce something even better, a speed control panel.
The Netflix mobile app is being tested and beta users are getting updated with a new feature to control the speed of the episode they are watching. There are various speed panels such as 0.5x that could make your video pretty slower as compared to the normal viewing experience while 1.5x could switch it up to a very higher playthrough.
Upon asking the question that will this ruin the watching experience of the user in any way? Netflix replied in a positive manner stating that the sound and pitch of the audio will be matched according to the speed panel and that it would still be enjoyable. Just a little hasty or slow wouldn’t ruin the end-user experience with problems like muffled or flawed audio-video sequence.
Netflix to launch new featuresThe news of their new development was confirmed in a blog post by Netflix in which they have mentioned “We’re always experimenting with new ways to help members use Netflix. This is a mobile-only test and gives people the ability to vary the speed at which they watch on phones or tablets – choosing from normal to slower (0.5X or 0.75X) or faster (1.25X and 1.5X). It’s a feature that has long been available on DVD players – and has been frequently requested by our members.”
The feature actually is quite useful and handy as one could really skip the long and boring sequence from one of their favorite series without actually missing out on any content. They could also slow it down to better understand what actually happened during one of the scenes.
Netflix to launch speed up feature for boring episodesAccording to the trends on other platforms such as YouTube which already has this feature integrated, it says that people do use this feature quite often. Mostly podcast watchers or someone getting a tutorial watches the videos in 1.5X as they had to finish through the long list of video playlist in a limited amount of time.
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The Binge-watching trend started by the Netflix releasing all the episodes at once can be supported further by the inclusion of this update. There are no dates given for the release of this update officially but Netflix says it’s not going to be anytime soon.
They must be really thinking about whether to give the user speed control or not. On one side it may increase user experience but on the other hand, there is a 50% chance that it can ruin it too and also shorten the average time a person uses Netflix due to speeded up episodes.