Skip Intro at Scale: How I Built Netflix’s Missing Feature for $0.30 per Movie
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The ‘Skip Intro’ button: a small click for a user, a big data point for streaming services, prompt by author
Everyone loves a good opening, until they’ve seen it for the tenth time.
Netflix users hit the “Skip Intro” button 136 million times per day, collectively saving humanity from 195 years of boring content every 24 hours. Yet despite this clear demand, automated intro detection remains surprisingly primitive.
Current solutions fall short in frustrating ways. Plex’s built-in detection refuses to mark intros shorter than 20 seconds or those that appear mid-episode, forcing viewers into a tedious dance with the fast-forward button.
Professional-grade alternatives like Amazon Rekognition and Google’s Video Intelligence API can handle the task, but at a crushing $0.05 per video minute. That is $6 to process a single two-hour film. For a modest media library, you’re looking at hundreds or thousands of dollars in API costs.
Enter Credit Scout: an AI agent that approaches the problem differently.
Instead of brute-forcing frame-by-frame analysis or relying on rigid pattern matching, Credit Scout leverages modern multimodal LLMs to understand…