Facebook is announcing a series of updates on how the social giant is showing video contents. The first is the autoplay for sounds on videos. After testing it out since late 2016, the company said that it has heard positive feedback from users about the feature.
Rolling out "slowly," audio on videos will fade in as users scroll past the video on their feed, and fades out when the video is out of view.
While sounds will not play if users' mobile device is in silent mode, Facebook is allowing users to disable the feature, in case it may not appeal to some. To do this, Facebook has added the "Video in News Feed Start With Sound" setting in the app Setting. Users can disable the feature by turning this off.
Facebook will also be providing "in-product messages to tell people about the new sound on experience and controls."
And following positive feedback on previous trials, Facebook is making vertical videos to take up a much larger portion of the screen on both Android and iOS devices.
Users can also activate a picture-in-picture mode to minimize a video window. This is similar to YouTube where users can continue scrolling on the feed while the video floats on the corner and keeps playing. But Facebook added a little tweak on it that enables users to move the floating video on any corner of the screen.
For Android users, they can continue to watch video even after closing the Facebook app. YouTube doesn't allow this.
And for last, Facebook is also announcing a video app for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV with other platforms are to follow. This allows users to watch videos shared by their friends or Pages they've followed, as well as other popular live streams around the world that are tailored to their interests.
Users can also watch all those videos they've saved to watch for later, or revisit the videos they've already watched or shared.