Facebook’s autoplay videos to play with sound on

PanARMENIAN.Net - Facebook’s autoplay videos will soon play with the sound on, the company announced Tuesday, February 14, an expansion of a test the social network started last fall. As you scroll through News Feed on a mobile device, the sound will “fade in and out” as you come across videos, Recode says.

There are a few caveats. Sound will only play if you already have the sound turned on for your phone; if your phone is in silent mode, for example, the videos won’t play with sound. You can also opt out of this whole thing in settings if it bothers you.

It’s a small but notable change for the company as it pushes even further into video. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained on the company’s last earnings call, Facebook wants to be a video destination, not just a feed that also happens to have videos.

Here’s how he described it:

“The goal that we have for the product experience is to make it so that when people want to watch videos or want to keep up to date with what’s going on with their favorite show, or what’s going on with a public figure that they want to follow, that they can come to Facebook and go to a place knowing that that’s going to show them all the content that they’re interested in. That’s a pretty different intent than why people come to Facebook today. ... The experience is designed to deliver on that promise — [that] you want to watch videos, you want to keep up with the content that you watch episodically week over week. This is going to be the place where you go to do that.”

Facebook says it plans to roll this feature out “slowly,” but hopes to do so globally by the end of the year, according to a company spokesperson.