When Instagram first introduced its video sharing feature, it was a little jarring at first to scroll through the Instagram news feed and suddenly have a video start playing when you arrived upon it. Granted it does save you some time from clicking on it, and it looks like Facebook is looking to introduce a similar feature to its mobile app as well. Given that Facebook owns Instagram, we guess this isn’t too surprising. In any case Facebook did announce that they were testing out the new system, “Today we’re starting to test an easier way to watch videos on Facebook. Now when you see a video in News Feed, it comes to life and starts playing. Videos initially play silently, and if you want you can tap to play with sound in full screen. Scroll past if you don’t want to watch.”

As Facebook has stated, this will be a new feature that is being tested meaning that not everyone will be able to see it or try it for themselves, but presumably if feedback is good on this new feature, the update should begin to make its way out to everyone. As expected Facebook does have plans on using it as a marketing tool, although they did not state when would be introducing the tool to marketers. If you thought videos playing silently/softly on webpages without you asking for it was annoying, we can only imagine it will be the same on mobile as well.

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