Facebook improves the videos on your timeline

Facebook has just announced a bunch of new features that will improve viewing video on its platform’s mobile app. Among the features announced were: auto-play videos will also play sound, portrait video viewing will improve, watch videos as you keep scrolling, and a new Facebook Video App for TV platforms.

Auto-play videos in the Facebook app will now play with sound on. Facebook has been slowly testing this feature which has seen positive reaction so far. Video sound will fade in as you reach the video, and then fade out as you scroll past the video. Facebook also promises the feature will not work when the device is in silent/vibrate mode. Don’t worry, there will also be an option to disable the sound, and the option to disable auto-play videos isn’t going anywhere.

Portrait video have grown in popularity lately, and the best way to view them is by watching them on the screen they were intended for: a smartphone. Facebook has improved support for watching videos that were filmed or edited in portrait mode. This will allow for videos to be seen at full magnification and with minimal black bars.

Sometimes you just wanna watch a video, but also keep scrolling. Well, now you can. Facebook will let you shrink a video to a picture-in-picture layout so you can watch that 10-minute fails compilation while you scroll through your friend’s political posts. Plus, if you're on Android, you can take the pop-out player outside of the Facebook app. While you do other thing.

And finally, Facebook is announcing a new Video app for TV. You can already cast a Facebook Video to Chromecast or Apple TV, but Facebook is going to launch an app for TV platforms like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung Smart TV so you can watch Facebook Videos on the big screen.

Facebook’s video audience is growing, and its video content (not to mention, its ability to search for videos) is pretty messy. But it’s still great to see that it put the effort into improving on it and making up ground to the competition.

Something that was not mentioned in the announcement post was the option to scrub videos more easily with a preview of the frame you might be looking for. You can see this feature in the embedded video.

What do you think of Facebook’s new features? Do you find any of them useful or do you avoid videos on Facebook altogether?

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