UPDATED 08:00 EDT / DECEMBER 18 2013

NEWS

Facebook’s about to unleash extremely annoying auto-play video ads

You may have noticed some changes to Facebook’s mobile app in the last few days, with video auto-play now enabled by default, allowing friend’s videos to begin playing on their own as you come across them.

Pretty cool right? It’s almost as if your News Feed springs to life all by itself, a pleasant distraction from the rest of that static content. Except, well, it won’t be for very much longer. While Facebook may have implemented the feature seamlessly, a new report in the Wall Street Journal brings the more depressing news that video autoplay will soon be applied to advertisements as well.

Even worse, you won’t just see them on the mobile app – they’re also going to pop-up on the desktop version of Facebook too, making it harder than ever to ignore the bombardment from marketers.

“Marketers will be able to use this new format to tell their stories to a large number of people on Facebook in a short amount of time—with high-quality sight, sound, and motion,” said Facebook in a blog post.

“This approach will continue to improve the quality of ads that you see in News Feed. This week, a small number of people will see video ads for the new film Divergent begin playing as they come into view on the News Feed on mobile and on desktop.”

The good news is that, for now at least, Facebook appears to be easing the ‘feature’ in gently. In its blog post, it says that while videos will automatically play when they appear on our News Feed, they won’t be screaming at us . Each video will be muted by, and users will have to click on it to begin listening – or simply keep scrolling down to avoid it. However, if you do make the mistake of clicking on one, it’ll immediately blow itself up into full screen mode, before suggesting other videos after it’s finished playing, “making it easy to continue to discover content from the same marketers,” Facebook states.

Okay but what about those using mobile phones with limited data plans and slow connections? Won’t this new video auto-play feature be a huge data drain, not too mention extremely annoying? Luckily, Facebook assures us that this won’t be the case, as videos will only be downloaded when your mobile device is connected to Wi-Fi. And for those who never connect to Wi-Fi, the videos just won’t play at all.

“If a user never connects to WiFi, then these videos will not begin to play directly in News Feed. A user would have to click on them to watch them,” said a Facebook spokesperson to FierceWireless.

Of course that doesn’t help those with less nimble fingers that accidentally click the video ads by mistake, who will only be able to curse as they blow up to full screen.

Enjoy the new ‘feature’ when it arrives ;-)


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