According to Twitter’s own data, 82% of its users view videos shared on their timelines. That number could rise depending on the success of Twitter’s new move to let videos shared on the timeline to auto-play. Vines, GIFs and native videos will all play automatically.
With auto-play on by default, tapping on the video will turn on sound (like Instagram videos do) and the video will continue playing in an expanded view. However if you turn the device into landscape mode when the video is on auto-play the video will expand to fill the screen and sound will be automatically turned on.
The main concern with such an arrangement is that for those of us who mind our data consumption, we’re likely to suffer. That will however not be the case here. Users will be able to turn off such settings and keep things as they are at the moment (i.e. click-to-play). Users can also choose to have videos auto-play only when they are on Wi-Fi or both on Wi-Fi and cellular data. Twitter will also automatically opt-out users from auto-play if they are in high data rates areas or in case they have low bandwidth on their device.
The auto-play feature is available to users of the Twitter iOS application and the web (twitter.com). Twitter promises that support for the Android application is on the way.
