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Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans

Posted by timothy on from the rude-to-users-is-the-short-term-business-mindset dept.

Another good reason to be annoyed by autoplaying videos online: it eats up dataplan allowances, making for some rude surprises. I'm always nervous about data allowances, and sites should be cautious about what they shove at you; turning off the autoplay feature isn't hard (and it's explained in the second article linked above), but I sure wish it was the default setting, or at least caught and handled by a browser extension. (Perhaps this is a job for Social Fixer's next iteration.) Is Facebook the worst offender on this front?

4 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot dups also chew up expensive data plans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Haven't we seen this news a few days ago already?

  2. get F.B. Purity by melios · · Score: 3, Informative

    F.B. Purity is available as an addon or GreaseMonkey script and already has the option to disable autoplay, among other things.

  3. Re:Autoplay is EVIL by GNious · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

    I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

    1) I suspect videos tend to be larger than Anim-GIFs by an order of magnitude
    2) Anim-GIFs do not have any sound, while video tend to have sound (ie. more data transferred even if muted during playback)
    3) Modern browsers have options for disabling auto-play of Anim-GIF, while similar control for video might be up to a 3rd party plugin

    Note how Google can use Anim-GIFs as a preview for YouTube videos on Google+ - I'm thinking they aren't doing this because it is fun.

  4. Turn off Facebook video autoplay by trawg · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're logged into Facebook, this link should take you straight to the settings page where you can disable the auto-playing of videos:

    https://www.facebook.com/setti...

    This should work for most people - although my brother (on Mac OS X) was not able to see the 'Videos' sub-menu (which for me appears in the list on the left at the very bottom).

    I only use the FB website on my mobile (the constant addition of new permissions turned me off the app), and am not sure if you can disable it within the app.