sound facebook

Autoplay videos to include sound on Facebook

sound facebook

Autoplay videos to include sound on Facebook

Social media site Facebook has announced that it plans on introducing a new feature that will see videos appearing in a user’s news feed automatically play with sound.

Much of the site’s growth over the last few years can be attributed to the increase in videos appearing on the site, and the enterprise has recently said that it plans to monetise that success, with this latest change seeming like one of the ideas that gets the ball rolling.

Videos have been automatically playing on Facebook’s news feeds for quite some time now, which has led to an increase in the uploads of “silent movies” as video publishers realised that the majority of viewers may be watching, but not listening, prompting many to include subtitles with their content.

However, Facebook has now put an end to this with its recent announcement that it will be enabling sound by default, meaning that scrolling through a news feed will become a noisier affair. The company has been testing this feature out on a number of users for a period and has now decided to put the wheels in motion to make this a permanent feature of the site after receiving positive feedback from the test subjects.

A blog post announcement from the Californian firm stated that the update will see sound faded in and out as a user scrolls past videos, bringing them to life. It has decided to introduce the feature as it believes that when people watch videos on their devices, they expect to hear sound, at least when they have the volume settings turned up.

This move may be one that receives a mixed bag of reviews from the site’s 1.86 billion users, as many may not want their devices blaring sounds they don’t want to hear every few seconds as they scroll through their news feed.

For those users who do not wish sound to automatically blast out with their videos, the company has stated that it will not override any settings on the main device, so if your phone is in silent mode, you will not hear any sounds from the videos. Furthermore, users will be able to change their Facebook settings to turn off the sound there too, or indeed stop videos autoplaying altogether.

This announcement is just the latest of the company’s video plans to be implemented onto its platform. Last month, the company outlined plans to introduce adverts to the middle of videos. As well as this, it also has an ambition to display vertical videos in full, making them appear larger in news feeds. It also has plans to allow users to continue watching a video while continuing scrolling down their feed – a similar function to one already found on YouTube.

Alan Littler
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