It used to be that watching a video on Twitter required several taps. So when something was unfolding in real time, be it an NBA finals game, your favorite TV show or breaking news, that extra effort meant viewers could miss something that important that they care about. Over the past year we’ve made several changes to improve how users share, discover and watch videos, such as reducing the number of taps it takes to play a video, introducing a native mobile camera and bringing videos and Vines front and center in your timeline.
Today, it’s become even easier to enjoy video on Twitter. Now native videos, Vines and GIFs will begin to play back automatically. So you can keep up with the action without missing a Tweet and get a better sense of what’s been shared instantly.
Once you tap the video, sound will turn on and the video will continue to play in an expanded view. If you turn the video to landscape mode, the sound will automatically turn on and the video will expand to fill the screen.
Twitter gives the users ultimate control through your settings; they can choose to revert to the previous click-to-play experience all the time or simply have videos autoplay only when you’re connected to Wi-Fi. If you are somewhere with high data rates or you have low bandwidth on your device, Twitter will opt you out of autoplay to avoid unexpected charges or slow performance; so you’ll continue to see videos as click-to-play. Check out our Help Center for more details on how to change your settings.
Twitter has started rolling out this change to everyone today on Twitter for iOS and twitter.com; the Android version is coming soon.
To learn more about the video opportunity on Twitter, visit video.twitter.com/about.
Image credits: Adweek
