Mobile internet army, prepare to lift up your virtual pitchforks once more: Twitter is the latest social network to test making videos play automatically when encountered within its mobile apps.
The company follows Facebook and Instagram in its desire to see whether users will be happy for videos to play without being tapped on, including advertisements.
“We’re running a small test on a few variations in the video playback experience,” a Twitter spokesperson told Advertising Age , with its report providing more details about what, exactly, those variations are: “This autoplay video test will apply to Promoted Video ads, videos that users upload through Twitter’s mobile app and clips that are part of its Amplify program, which lets companies like ESPN and the NFL post videos with pre-roll ads, according to a person familiar with the matter. Videos that originate in Vine, Twitter’s company’s 6-second-video app, will not play automatically on Twitter as part of this test.”
The report notes that one test will see entire videos playing on a loop, while another will simply loop a six-second preview of the main video. The news follows Twitter’s launch of a native video feature in January , enabling its users to upload 30-second non-looping videos which would then play within people’s timelines on the service.
The company’s Amplify initiative launched in 2013 , though, and has been used by a number of broadcasters and brands to distribute highlights of sports, music and other popular televised events.
Twitter’s test, which for now is confined to its iOS apps, follows Facebook’s announcement in December 2014 that video ads for mobile apps would automatically play within its news feed, although tests of auto-playing videos began within its apps in September 2013 .
Instagram videos have also automatically played for some time now, and in February the company changed its app to make them loop infinitely while on-screen too.
What about those pitchforks? All these moves have sparked protests from a sizeable group of users of these social networks, with fears of spiralling data usage when their smartphones are not connected to a Wi-Fi network, and accusations that automatically-playing videos serve advertisers rather than users.
That said, the protests have tended to settle down fairlyquickly, and that’s likely to be the case here, with Twitter under more scrutiny from its keenest users over any plans to mess with their unfiltered reverse-chronological timelines .
