14 DAY TRIAL // It's been rumored for a while now, but Facebook has announced that it's now experimenting with automatically playing videos in the news feed. As you scroll down to see different posts from people, videos will start playing, silently, when you get to them.
Continue to scroll down and they go away, but if you're interested in them, you can switch to fullscreen mode and hear the sound as well.
A year or even a few months ago, the idea would have seemed ridiculous and more than a bit annoying. Now, it just seems like it's old. For most people, especially the younger audience, this won't seem annoying, in fact, it will be quite familiar.
What changed from last year to now is that Vine showed up onto the scene. Videos play automatically in the Vine feed and they play automatically when embedded elsewhere as well.
In fact, Facebook has already copied Vine once when it introduced Instagram videos, so this is a new record of sorts, Facebook copying the same thing twice.
Unlike most of the other times when Facebook copied something, this feature may actually stick around. In fact, you can be pretty sure that this will be the default behavior for videos on Facebook and possibly other places from now on.
Automatically playing videos, by themselves, aren't that bad, if they are silent. They can be distracting, but, especially in a mobile news feed, where you're only focusing on one thing, they're easily dismissed.
The problem is when this is the default behavior even if you're not connected to a WiFi network. If you've used Vine with your mobile data connection for any amount of time, you have probably noticed that those six-second videos suck up a lot of bandwidth fast.
Facebook videos, which don't have a time limit, would be even worse. This is happening, by the way, just as Facebook is working on driving down the data usage of its mobile apps, so they can be more appealing to users in developing countries.