Like it or not, it looks like Facebook has went ahead to allow videos to play automatically in your News Feed. Like other video services such as Vine and even Instagram, videos will only autoplay when you scroll through them and voice will be muted, thankfully. The autoplay feature will only work for native videos that are uploaded to Facebook and when tapped on, will bring you to a full screen mode with voice.
At the time of writing, it looks like Facebook for iOS Version 6.8 brings autoplay video only to users in the U.S.. According to the description in iTunes (U.S., Malaysia and Australia for comparison sake), only the U.S. store has “Videos now play automatically in News Feed — tap for sound” written in the change log. Don’t be too happy yet though, it has been widely rumored that Facebook will introduce video ads as early as next year and TechCrunch has even confirmed with Facebook that the new format is being rolled out internationally to most iOS and Android users with desktop version still in the works.
Worried about your data quota being sucked up dry by auto playing videos? Well, fret not, according to TechCrunch, there’s an added settings that allows users select only to auto play when user is connected to Wi-Fi and not on cellular data. The settings should be available for both iOS and Android right now so activate it before you get a bill shock when the feature suddenly goes live for us.
(Source: Engadget, TechCrunch, iTunes, Google Play)
