Facebook videos in your News Feed soon autoplay with sound
You can turn it off in Settings. You’re welcome.
The age of scrolling through your Facebook News Feed past mercifully silent autoplaying videos is over. The social media giant is showering its users with unasked-for love by automatically triggering sound when hovering over a movie, and will soon begin rolling out the change it started testing last August.
In a blog post, Facebook portrays the change as a quality of life improvement: People just expect sound to play when they show interest in a video, and this makes the experience more seamless. It also makes sure advertisement audio hits your ears. Fortunately, it won't play on phones set to silent, and you can opt out of autoplaying sound permanently by toggling off "Videos in News Feed Start With Sound" in Settings. Facebook is planning a slow rollout that will eventually be global by the end of the year, the company told Recode.
Facebook added improvements to the mobile video experience, too. Now after a few seconds of watching, vertical movies will automatically fill the screen until users scroll away. Folks can also drag the video down to a corner to keep it playing in a picture-in-picture format while they continue scrolling through their feed -- or as they navigate out of the app if they're using an Android device.
Finally, if you wanted to watch Facebook videos on your smart TV, now's your chance. The social media company made an app that's debuting on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV, and will open up to more platforms in the future.
