How would you go about designing a skip feature for a video streaming service?

Question

How would you go about designing a skip feature for a video streaming service?

Skip here refers to the ability to move past portions of the video and not skip the whole video. The goal of designing this feature is to give the user the most enjoyable video watching experience.

Asked at Netflix over a year ago

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Product Design category

& 1 other company

Asked at

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6.2k views

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Sanchit Gupta · Answer 1 · 2020-05-03T07:06:04+0000

Clarify

Skipping parts of the video or entire video? (Parts of it)
Why are we building this/ how did we get the idea or directive to do this? (Common customer request, no more info we have on how it should be built)
What type of video streaming site is this? Any specific types of content it has or users it serves (Assume this is a YouTube compete, so a broad range)

Users

Video watchers
- Information watchers - people who learn basic things like how to tie a tie or replace a tire or swap out batteries.
- Educational learners - people who learn new topics here (listen to lectures, debates, etc.)
- Music listeners/ music video watchers
- Sports highlights watchers
- Political watchers
Content creators

I would use data to understand what types of watchers are most common to understand who to optimize for, but for the purpose of this exercise, it doesn't matter a whole lot since their use cases overlap a lot. I will pick the watchers category since they will be the ones that will be skipping around the video and are the primary users.

Use cases

Too long of a video so I need to skip around
- Nice to see the video content of where I'm trying to skip to before committing to the skip for most of the users above.
I want to see a specific part of the video
- I want to see the top 1 play out of top 10, I want to see the part where the president talks about corporate policy, I want to see the actual wheel coming off of a car, etc.
I want to re-watch something I already watched so I want to go back and later skip forward.

I'm going to focus on the specific part of the video because I think it covers the most broad spectrum.

Solutions

Skip to different parts of the video that the content creator manually tagged
- Example, a top 10 plays video can have different tags so people can skip around
Allow users to hover over the time of the video at different portions and get a glimpse at what's happening there
Allow users to press a button that skips forward by 15 or 30 seconds and use data to fine tune that number over time.

To decide, I'm going to go back to the goal of giving the user the most enjoying experience and from that, prioritize which one. Specifically, I'm going to look at:

Reach
- 2, 3 (highest)
- 1 (lowest)
Impact
- 1, 2 (highest)
- 3 (lowest)
Confidence
- 2 (higher)
- 1, 3 (lowest)
Effort
- 3 (least)
- 2
- 1 (most)

With all of this considered, I would pick option 2.

Success Metrics

Average time spent on a video
# of skips within a video
- # of "fine tunes" aka slight skips
- # of consecutive skips
# of rewinds within a video
- # of "fine tunes" aka slight skips
- # of consecutive rewinds
# of videos watched/ user

Vishant Batta · Answer 2 · 2020-05-01T21:48:45+0000

Seeking feedback on my answer to this product design question.

Clarifying questions
-By "skipping some portions", do you mean skipping less significant parts like credits, songs, etc.?
- Platforms on which the service streams?
Users- can be divided on the basis of platform- Web(W) | Mobile(M) | TV
Pain points
W- Have to skip insignificant parts by tapping right key/seek by mouse. Data gets used unnecessarily.
M - Have to skip insignificant parts by double tap/Skip 'n' seconds button/seek by touch slider. Data gets used unnecessarily, sometimes starts buffering due to low bandwidth in mobiles
TV- Have to skip insignificant parts by arrow keys on remote- a bit inaccurate, sometimes skips more than required.

Summarizing the problems on which our feature will revolve- Better way to skip the insignificant parts in an accurate way.

Targeting the feature-
We can see the whole video as a collection of sections- Credits + content + songs + intro + recap, etc.
Categorize these sections into significant and insignificant.

Show a "Skip Intro/recap/etc." button for the insignificant part. For a better viewing experience, show just for the first 5 seconds of that section.

Pitfalls- A user might feel the first 5 seconds interesting but wants to skip after that.
Solution- Label each section as "Intro/song/recap/etc." and allow users to navigate between these sections. How?
Web- Clicking the particular section on seek bar(shows a clickable label)/dedicated keys.
Phone- Clicking the particular section on seek bar(shows a clickable label)/double finger double tap/dedicated button
TV- While on seek bar, press the "UP" button to switch between sections using the right and left keys.

praveen reddy · Answer 3 · 2022-05-06T09:27:55+0000

I would like to ask few clarification questions

Are we trying to implement a feature that allows customers to move from one movie to other or to skip certain sections of the video? Later
Are we showing ads in between which customer wanted to skip or they want to skip certain section of the movie? Later
For the sake of the interview, can we assume that there is no constraints? Yes

Summary: Customer streaming the videos through our platform wanted to skip certain portion of the video so that can watch important section in the movie and finish watching the video within the time available to them.

The mission of the XX company is empower customers to enjoy watching videos whenever and wherever they want to. The feature to skip certain sections of the video will allow customers to fit video streaming in their busy schedule. Therefore this feature fits with the companies wider mission.

User Persona

Creator – People who create the content (movie producers, sitcom producers, documentary producers)
1. Movies producers: They are big production houses create and release movies regularly. Typically the length of the video is 2 hours
2. Documentary producers: These are large documentary producers like Nat Geo, History, Discovery etc. who create context in different topic, catering to the interest of different type of audience. The length the video ranges from 45 mins to 90 mins
Consumer – People who consume the content

Skeptical – user who create an account but not willing to subscribe. They don’t see an value in the service or not interested in the service. The created an account to give a try.
Occasional watcher – Prefer to watch the most popular title but they are too busy or do not have motivation to stream videos often.
Movie buffs / Reviewers – Streaming videos is part of their life and they are interested in different types of content. They spend at least 10 hours streaming videos on weekly basis.

In the terms of the user, I will shortlist movie producers and occasional watcher. On the consumer side, I used total addressable market (TAM) and applicability of feature to the target as shortlisting factor. Even though TAM for freemium users is higher than occasional watcher, skip feature is not their primary unmet needs. On the creator side, I used length of video as shortlisting criteria.

User Problem:

Creator	Feature	Reach	Impact	Complexity
Customer often abandon the movie if certain parts of the movie is not interesting to them	Allow producers to create tags in the movie so that customer can skip some sections	XL	XL	L
Customer are shortlisting the movie based on the play time. The lengthier the move, the lower the chance to be added in to customer watch it.	Include video reviews to induce customers to shortlist the movie	S	S	M
I don’t know what types of scenes/dialogue customer are not liking so that I will not use in the future	Create a data sharing model where movie makers will receive feedback on what sections of the movie is skipped by different type of customer	S	S	L
Consumer
Certain section of the movie is not interesting and I am worried that I might miss an important scene if I take a break	Create a feature for customer can skip content for specified time interval ( every skip 1 minute, 2 minute, or 5 mins)	XL	L	S
I don’t have time to watch the entire movie.	Allow fast forward (2X, 4X, 8X ) so that customer can skim through boring portion and watch important sections	L	M	S
I have a limited bandwidth availability and don’t want to load the entire context.	Create a feature for customers to select certain portion of the movie and only load that section	M	S	XL

Metrics:

Success Criteria:

Increase in

Average number of titles watched (Weekly /Monthly)
Average time spent watching content (Weekly /Monthly)

Guardrails

% of titles where the feature is used at least once
Average # of times the feature used per movie

Prioritization: Based on the reach, impact and complexity, I will shortlist solution 4 for our MVP and 1 as fast follow.

Summary: Customer do not have time to watch full movie or find certain parts of it uninteresting. They do not have an option to view only the sections of the movie they find interesting. Therefore, we will build a feature that will allow customer to skip the movie by X intervals. We will conduct the A/B test to ensure it meets the above launch criteria to successfully launch the feature.

Abhinav Chitre · Answer 4 · 2022-05-01T09:33:45+0000

Questions

What kind of videos are available via this streaming service?

Similar to youtube, netflix

What is the goal : to provide the most enjoyable video watching experience.

What kind of content does video streaming service showcase? sports(live or highlights) , music videos, general/news videos/talk-shows, howto videos, educational videos, movies/tvshows etc.

Goal

to prvide the most enjoyable video watching experience.

Users

Family users who are TV show or movie buffs

Casual Watchers

Sports Lovers

Students / Artists

Searching for DIY/informative videos

Lets focus on a few major user segments which are highlighted above since our streaming service will be used by all of these user segments.

Painpoints

1) when you are watching any thing with family, you may have kids, old people and you may want to skip certain parts of video such as intimate scenes or violent scenes which may not be appropriate.

2) when you are watching indian movies, you may have songs which sometimes break the flow of the movie.

3) you are watching a DIY or informative video as you may want to know how you accomplish a certain task for example ..lets say you want to see how to add detergent to the washing machine of a specific model , you want to only see that part or not other parts of the video.

4)The opening credits may be long and you may want to skip them.

5) Since Youtube is a platform which also has advertisements for monetization purposes, often users may want to skip these ads.

6) In any type of video , you may want to skip certain parts or scenes

Lets prioritize these painpoints based on their impact to the goal

6> 1 > 5 > 2 > 3 > 4

Lets focus on top 3 or 4 painpoints for now.

Solutions

1) You can have a button in the video player to skip , its skip by 1 minute by default you can set this interval as n seconds or minutes.

2) Simple Indexing by dividing the video and show list of all sequences or scenes or parts of the video, the user can choose to skip to the specific scene. Show list of scenes and user can click on a scene. (Each scene can be taken as 2 minutes)

3) Proper Indexing using AI/ML and show list of all sequences or scenes or parts of the video, the user can skip and move to next scene using a Next Sequence Button (Each scene can be taken as 2-5 minutes)

4) Every advertisement should have a skip button by default

(understand the commercial implication of this)

5) Index intimate/violent scenes or songs using AI/ML and give option to skip to the end of that scene or song

I think we should definitely start with 1 and 2 which may be easier to implement compared to the

4 is already present just need to show it for all ads.

with more research and development we can implement 3 & 5 in the long run.

Metrics

Increase in average watching time per user per day per week per month

Increase Number of videos watched per user

Increase in number of videos watched per user

Number of videos completed per user

Use of skip sequence during a session.

Average time skipped per skip use.

Key Metric will be number of skips used during a session and increase in average daily/weekly/monthly watching time

indianPM · Answer 5 · 2021-08-25T20:53:51+0000

Hotstar skip video
Assumptions	Skip by X seconds functionality is already there. This one is primarily skipping specific content within the video
	While Hotstar is into live-streaming of sports and other events too, the focus for this problem is TV shows and movies

Business case	Increase engagement
Customer use cases	Skip repeated content in TV series, Example: Credits at start and end
	Skip non-interesting parts (Example: Songs in movie)
	Skip adult content when around kids or family
	(Related, but different feature) Skip to specific parts of interest: Wickets in a Cricket match, popular songs in a movie etc.
	First two P0, third P1 and fourth is a P2 (actually a different feature)

Additional stakeholder
Content producer	Would want to have some control on how content gets viewed
	Prefers the user to watch the content in full, but better to get more users watch videos with skipped content than less users watching in full
	Good to have: some analytics to know which parts are getting skipped.
Metrics
Possible downside	Skipped video -> Less time the video is watched -> Less time to monetize the user
Way to measure it right	Total minutes watched for the show across all users (Hypothesis: skipping videos will lead to less users dropping off)
	Number of users finishing the show/episodes
	Number of distinct programs watched per user

Solutionizing
Customer side	Assuming the skippable content is marked, implementing this should be relatively easy.
	A label can come right after the start of the skippable content. This can be clicked or tapped to skip the content
	An option should to go back may be provided for the next 5 seconds if the user wants to change his mind (Example: if the user believes some story progression happened during the song he skipped)

Labelling side	This is where the majority of the work needs to happen. This can be done in two ways
	1) Curation: Control is primarily in hands of producer or Hotstar content team. We need to enable compartmentalizing videos into distinct parts and labeling of videos with distinct labels
	This will be the way to start
	2) System-driven labeling: This will be the way to scale
	Basic system of curation-labels and consumer side flows will largely be the same, but the actual process of labeling can be more intelligent when done through system
	Some intelligence can be introduced to identify skipable and labelable parts
	-- Parts that are frequently skipped through chunks of skip X seconds
	-- Songs can be distinctly identified from dialogues through sound patterns
	-- Scenes with nudity or adult content can again be identified through a classification model
	-- For TV series, the starting and end-credits can be identified through comparing and identifying reasonably common start and end points acorss continuous episodes

Future Features	For future versions, an auto-skip config can be set up at a profile level or at a program level (skip songs, skip nudity etc.)
	Crowdsourced curation of summary of skippable parts can be made available on the app (runpee.com already does this)
	Opposite of skippable parts: Use similar flow to recommend frequently watched parts of the program.

Bharat Rathi · Answer 6 · 2020-05-05T15:16:36+0000

Clarifying Questions

1. What user problem are we trying to solve using Skip function?

Interviewer --> Improve user stickiness

Can you please explain the user stickiness with a scenario? - We need user to watch the content in an uninterrupted manner to ensure user has a control to watch the content which in turn will improve customer stickiness.

2. Who are the users ? i.e. Specific platform? - Web, Tablet, Phone

Interviewer -- > Applicable to all platforms

Solution - User needs to use skip function to be in control of the content being viewed and maintain continuity in their viewing experience without any distraction.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Feature	Business Impact	Complexity	Priority
Create a function to skip the Intro music	High	Medium	1
Create a function to skip the end credits	High	Medium	1
Create a function to skip a song number	Medium	High	4
Create a button to skim through the screens	Medium	High	2
Create a button to skip Previous episode reference scenes	Medium to High	Medium	3
Create a button to skip previous episode reference and intro music	Medium to High	Medium	5**
Factors behind considering the Business impact as High 1. Content does not relate to the context of a particular episode but very generic in nature 2. Repetitive Factors behind considering the Business impact as Medium 1. Content which breaks the consistency of the viewing but may relate to the particular episode **Though a skip button to skip Previous episode reference and intro music may have medium to high impact, but placing 2 skip button with different function may create confusion for user. User may end up not using skip function owing to the confusion

Success measure -->

1. Increase in user viewing hours who are using skip button function

PMVision · Answer 7 · 2020-05-02T13:06:45+0000

Clarifying question

Do we have a specific device in mind TV, smart phone , Ipad etc?

Is there a feature currently available in the platform to skip a part of the video?

How does it work? Are there known issues with the feature?

Are there some part of it that works well?

What is the goal?

To fix a broken feature

to increase user engagement; the time user spends watching videos on the platform.

Pain points

Video in skip mode moves very fast and user most of the time has to go back and forth a couple times to make sure he skips how much he wants skip, no more and no less.

He wants to skip the current scene but not sure until what point the skip should continue.

He is anxious that he might miss something more entertaining/ or a key step while following a recipe as an example.

Solution

Show picture preview of the video as it moves forward so the user can visually decide when he wants to stop the skip

Tag the entire video with important plot changes and key details, the video pauses on these key points while the video is in skip mode