If you’re not a fan of the silent videos that automatically play in your Facebook news feed, there’s a change on the way. Those videos will no longer be silent.
In an announcement made at the Code Media conference in Dana Point, California, Facebook vice president Dan Rose said “We think people are comfortable with it now.” He noted that the feature had been tested on a small group of users, and that they’re received positive feedback so far.” “As people watch more video on phones, they’ve come to expect sound when the volume on their device is turned on.”
Sound on auto play videos can be turned off in the app’s settings, and each individual video can be muted, but sound is going to be turned on by default.
Rose noted that the video wouldn’t start playing sound suddenly, but would fade in and out as the user scrolled through their page, “bringing the videos to life.” Important to note is that the videos won’t play sound if the user has their phone set to silent.
Facebook’s VP also made two other interesting announcement about Facebook video at the conference – videos on Facebook will now be viewable on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung’s smart TV apps, and Facebook won’t crop videos that are produced in a vertical format. Vertical videos will play as normal, just in a larger format.
“A lot of people when they’re watching video in the News Feed during the day will save it for later because they don’t have time to watch,” Rose said. “Now it’s easy to watch on your TV if you want to do that.”
Like most changes Facebook makes, this new feature will be rolled out to users slowly, meaning it could be some time before you hear the change in your news feed. This announcement comes just after Facebook announced they would begin showing certain articles in a “chat window” style box in the bottom right corner.
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