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Netflix Sharknado hack jumps right to the biting bits

It's a hacknado.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
2 min read
sharknadostill

Skip to the toothy parts.

Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET

A bewildering question has plagued humanity since 2013: Why do we watch the Sharknado movies? It's not for the acting chops, the questionable CGI, the scintillating scripts or the inevitable David Hasselhoff cameo. It's to see sharks bite things in ridiculous situations. 

A team involved in Netflix's Fall 2018 Hack Day has tapped into our deepest and darkest Sharknado urges by creating Jump to Shark, an upgrade to the Netflix viewing experience that lets CGI shark lovers jump straight to the bloodiest and most biting parts of the movie.

A demonstration video shows how Jump to Shark works. As Sharknado plays, a little pop-up in the corner appears that says "Jump to shark" with a little shark icon next to it. Tapping on it takes you forward to the next scene featuring sharks, letting you skip all the dialogue and boring stuff in between.

Netflix's Hack Days are times when employees get to explore strange new worlds and play around with creative features through software and hardware experiments. For a Hack Day earlier this year, a team sent Netflix up to the edge of space using a weather balloon.

Jump to Shark is the brilliant brainchild of Netflix senior software engineer Juliano Moraes and senior test engineer Shivaun Robinson.  

The Sharknado franchise is supposedly beached after 2018's The Last Sharknado: It's About Time. That still gives us half a dozen of the campy Syfy TV movies to contend with.

Unfortunately, the general populace isn't likely to see the Jump to Shark feature on their Netflix apps, so they'll just have to keep fast-forwarding to the good parts the old-fashioned way.

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