Facebook Blamed For Driving Up Cellphone Bills, But It's Not Alone

colinneagle writes "Consumer site MoneySavingExpert.com reported today that it has seen "many complaints" from users who believe a recent increase in data-related charges on their cellphone bills are the result of Facebook's auto-play feature. The default setting for the auto-play feature launches and continues to play videos silently until the user either scrolls past it or clicks on it; if the user does the latter, the video then goes full-screen and activates audio. The silent auto-play occurs regardless of whether users are connected to Wi-Fi, LTE, or 3G.

However, it's likely that Facebook isn't entirely to blame for this kind of trend, but rather, with the debut of its auto-play feature, threw gas on an already growing fire of video-sharing services. Auto-play for video is a default setting on Instagram's app, although the company refers to it as "preload." Instagram only introduced video last summer, after the Vine app, a Twitter-backed app that auto-plays and loops six-second videos, started to see significant growth.

Comments

Re:Misleading wording. This is not autoplay.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the Facebook (mis)feature truly is autoplay. The video starts playing (without sound) until you click on it, at which point it goes full-screen and enables sound.

Re:Is there any way to stop auto-play?

[Tukz]

You can disable it you know.

Settings -> Videos -> Auto-play Videos [off].

Re:Stupid design, appalling

[pabacon]

They should have either a wifi only option or a play button

There actually are options for wifi-only or to disable auto-play entirely but yes, one of these should be the default.

Read first?

[Camael]

I'd like to pin the blame for this, not on Facebook, but on the people who write the browsers. You can assume that there'll be some stupid site on the internet which will try to waste your bandwidth - but a browser shouldn't permit it to do so. Browsers should never auto-play videos.

If you read TFA:-

A default feature in Facebook’s mobile app that automatically launches videos in users’ newsfeeds has been blamed for devouring mobile phone users’ data and driving up their cellphone bills.

Nothing to do with browsers.

Be careful. Updates might re-enable autoplay

[zizzybaloobah]

I participate in the beta for the Android app. We've had several updates that re-enabled that feature. smdh. It boggles my mind that not only did FB think this was an important feature missing from their application, but so important that it needed to be enabled by default. smdh again.

Re:Stupid design, appalling

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Makes me think: is auto-playing HTML5 video a possibility?

Yes, there's a standard way to specify autoplay for HTML5 videos. However, not all browsers will respect it. For example, Safari on iOS won't play unless the user specifically starts the video, and this was a deliberate decision on Apple's part.