Facebook Plans to Make Videos ‘Autoplay’

Facebook announced its new plan to integrate “autoplay” to its mobile application which will allow video recordings to play automatically in the social networking site. This move will turn the Facebook News Feed pages into a more dynamic experience with a multitude of scenes running in them.

The News Feeds will soon be quite similar to web pages in the Vine video with videos all playing at the same time. The social networking firm is preparing to launch this new feature to a select, limited group of American mobile subscribers on Thursday. More users and subscribers will soon have this access in the next coming weeks.

Facebook is looking at attracting more advertising deals with this strategic move. The social networking giant is positioning the company in the new online trend of video advertising. The outlook for digital videos in the U.S. advertising industry is seen to double to $8 Billion in 2016 from this year's $4.1 billion, based from research firm eMarketer's forecast.

Imagine sponsored media being played automatically and specifically being filtered through to interested people through history of "liked" pages. However the social networking giant will focus initially in offering this new feature to Facebook members and will hold sponsored videos at the moment.

Only videos from its users or those from previously "liked" webpages will be played automatically in Facebook. These include videos from official pages like Lady Gaga's, those directly uploaded records and videos from other Facebook-integrated applications like Instagram. On the other hand, those from Vimeo, YouTube and other videos only embedded in the site won't be played automatically.

The default setting for the volume is mute but once the videos start to roll, users have the option to expand the screen and raise the volume as they prefer.

-hngn.com