In this article, David Pogue mentions Netflix’ neat technique for letting viewers fast forward streaming movies.
Remember, these videos are streamed to your TV (in other words, played from the Internet as you watch), so fast-forwarding and rewinding is a problem. The part of the movie you’d want to fast-forward to hasn’t arrived at your house yet.
Netflix pioneered the clever workaround: when you press the right-arrow key, little thumbnails of coming scenes flash by, representing 10-second intervals. You wait about 15 seconds for Netflix to resume playback at the new spot.
Here’s a look at the UI in action as you scroll to the right:
Matt Linderman wrote this on Feb 17 2010 There are 7 comments.
Jonathan Sterling 17 Feb 10
I love Netflix’s fast forwarding. I was surprised when I first saw it: I had never thought of a solution like that.
Josh Walsh 17 Feb 10
A good idea that’s not quite ready yet. This seems to replace the idea of using the slider to move fwd or back. The problem is that the slider is sluggish. This is a band-aid on top of a broken slider.
It’s a neat way of fast forwarding, but it doesn’t replace the slider.
Jacob Gminder 17 Feb 10
This is definitely awesome. It sucks that UPnP servers haven’t caught on to this and fast forward and rewind functions still suck when say streaming something to my PS3 .
Michael 17 Feb 10
It would be so much more awesome if they collected data to know where people like to skip to and when they like to do it, then used bandwidth in excess of buffering to preload those parts in priority order.
Anand 17 Feb 10
It would be neat if it actually worked. Forwarding and rewinding are a nightmare on Netflix streaming. The idea has promise, it just needs to be implemented well. Hopefully they will get there after a few revisions of the software.
Dan Y 17 Feb 10
The Playstation 3 actually does this. It’s called “Scene Search” :
http://uk.playstation.com/ps3/support/movies/detail/linked224928/item124958/Use-Scene-Search/
You can select the time interval you want to see scene previews for.
mike 18 Feb 10
Many porn sites do this like videobox or penthouse.net, except they let you fast forward while you are watching by scrolling thru a snapshot of the movie taken every 6 or 10 secs.
This discussion is closed.