Facebook will begin
testing a new mobile feature Thursday that plays videos automatically
as users scroll through their News Feeds. The videos will begin playing
as they come into view on the screen, and users can preview them within
the News Feed without clicking on or opening them.
Each video will play silently and can be viewed with sound upon clicking.
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The new capability will only be rolled out a small group of random
users, and videos will only play automatically if they are uploaded
directly to Facebook — not embedded from other sites like YouTube.
Still, Facebook hopes the added functionality will let users get more
out of the video content on their feed, particularly since Facebook lets
users preview the video without interrupting the scroll.
This new autoplay feature only applies to videos uploaded by
individuals, bands and musicians. In other words, brand pages won't be
able to use autoplay for promotional videos, and Facebook doesn't offer
video advertisements at this time.
No details were released regarding a timeline for rolling out the
feature to all users, or whether it will be available for Facebook's
desktop platform.