Don’t wish to open up videos that show gory or scary things because you don’t have the stomach for it, or you have a toddler around and don’t wish to scare their childhood away? It looks like you no longer have a choice as Facebook announced that it will start rolling out an update that will autoplay all videos on your News Feed. For now, the autoplay will only work on videos uploaded directly onto Facebook and if it’s any consolation, the videos will only play when you scroll through them (like Vine) and will be muted until you tap into it. For now, only videos uploaded onto Facebook by individual users, verified pages and bands will autoplay but it’s only a matter of time before it comes to other type of users.
Facebook has been rumored to be working on showing video advertisements within its network and this may be a start to that. In the FAQ section, Facebook even mentioned that even though the autoplay feature will only work on selected individual users or pages, they will “continue to explore how to bring this to marketers in the future”. The feature will be rolled out to mobile users in the coming weeks.
Sure Facebook, don’t bring GIF animations to your News Feed, just roll out video autoplays instead, that’ll make your users happy. Just a note of warning to you all, it’s time to filter your News Feed and hide updates from all your “friends” who love to share videos of people hurting one another, car accidents and such.
