The autoplay video hits keep coming. Facebook is testing a new wrinkle in its video offering: a feature that automatically plays another video after the one you are watching ends.
The test, reported this morning by Recode, is being shown to some users on iOS and Android devices.
It’s a move beyond recommended video, which Facebook introduced last September, and different than autoplay in the News Feed which has been in place for well over a year.
From the Recode story:
In this new test, if you don’t click on a “related video” after a certain amount of time following the end of your video (Facebook is testing different lengths), the next video in the queue will start playing on its own.
The feature is similar to how Netflix queues up and plays the next suggested video and seems likely, if fully rolled out, to add further to Facebook’s surging video views. The company reported in January that videos are getting 3 billion views a day on the network, three times more than in September.
Facebook’s aggressive push into video is clearly not letting up. The Information reported this week (members only link) that the company is pitching a new premium video product called “Anthology” to advertisers.
According to the report, Facebook is working with publishers, including Vine, The Onion and Vox Media, to produce short-form videos that would be sponsored by advertisers (with a $2 million minimum buy in).
Adding more high-quality video to the News Feed would make it more likely that people would sit back and watch. And that would play well with this new continuous autoplay feature.
The Facebook experiment is also similar to YouTube’s new default. As we reported this week, the Google-owned video network is now automatically playing the next recommended video.
Twitter is also experimenting with autoplay video, although that test is more along the lines of Facebook’s News Feed feature.
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